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Nellie Bly in Nebraska

Nellie Bly. Wikimedia Commons
 
“Nellie Bly” was the professional pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (1867-1922), one of Joseph Pulitzer’s best reporters at the New York World. She won international fame in 1889 and 1890 by outdoing Jules Verne’s fictional hero in going around the world in fewer than eighty days (seventy-two days, six hours, ten minutes, and fifty-eight seconds). However, Nellie Bly was chiefly an investigative reporter with a driving zeal for social justice. Although not a political radical, she saw her mission as aiding the oppressed and downtrodden—the “neglected inmates of the New York City madhouse; degraded dwellers of filthy slum tenements; or malnourished, overworked, and underpaid women and children in sweatshops.” (Nebraska History, Spring 1986) Her compassion was aroused by the stories of the plight of Nebraska farmers after the drought year of 1894 when the state suffered from almost a total corn crop failure. In the early winter of 1895 Nellie Bly visited a tier of north and central Nebraska counties, as well as a small portion of South Dakota. She described her impressions of the blighted land and its people in a series of five articles, which appeared in the New York World between January 18 and February 13, 1895. “One glimpse of the home life out from the railroads and one is convinced that the tales of destitution in Nebraska have not been exaggerated,” she wrote in an article from Valentine. “I drove over thirty miles around the country to-day and I saw nothing but misery and desolation.” Considered to be some of the best of her journalistic career, the articles helped convince the eastern press that the stories emanating from Nebraska in 1894 and 1895 were no exaggerations and encouraged eastern relief efforts to the Midwest.

 

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Other Publications

The Bachelors’ Protective Union of Kearney

When the Bachelors' Protective Union gave a gala reception for two of its newly married, former members and their brides in March of 1890, the social club for young, ...

U.S. Weather Bureau in 1890s Nebraska

The U.S. Weather Bureau was established by an act of Congress on October 1, 1890. It took over the weather service that had been established in the office of the Chief ...

Canning the Way to Victory

During American participation in World War I the U.S. Food Administration, under the direction of Herbert Hoover, launched a massive campaign to persuade Americans to ...

The Shoemaker’s Ashes

"Edward Kuehl, one of the most peculiar characters that ever lived in Omaha, or anywhere else, was found dead in his bed last night in the back room of his place of ...

Crazy Horse Surrender Ledger Foreward

Red Dog, an Oglala Lakota who lived at the Red Cloud Agency, Nebraska, 1876-77 (Nebraska State Historical Society RG2955.ph).   In the summer of 1876, following the ...

Darryl F. Zanuck

Darryl F. Zanuck Darryl F. Zanuck (1902-1979), a native Nebraskan, produced some of Hollywood's most important and controversial films. He helped found 20th Century Fox ...

The Burlington’s Profitable Pork Special

Nebraska railroads were much concerned with developing an adequate economy in the areas they served. The Burlington, for example, had a long history of caring for the ...

Bungalow Filling Stations

After the giant Standard Oil Company was broken into thirty-four separate companies in 1911, the newly independent Standard Oil of Nebraska dominated the state's market ...

The Bull Fight

This is the perfect time of year for a visit to the old fishin' hole. But a group of fisherfolk from Plainview discovered that this bucolic pastime sometimes has ...

Buffalo Soldiers West

African-American soldiers on the western frontier are the focus of an exhibit at the Nebraska History Museum in Lincoln. Buffalo Soldiers West, on loan from the Colorado ...

Protection for Buffalo

The extermination of the buffalo on the Plains occurred largely between 1870 and 1885. The Nebraska State Journal of Lincoln on February 1, 1874, editorialized in vain ...

Buffalo Hunting

In late October 1877 young Rolf Johnson and three friends left their homes in Phelps County, Nebraska, for a buffalo hunt in northeastern Colorado. The hunt was not very ...

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