New Year’s Welcome in 1914
The arrival of the New Year of 1914 in Omaha was joyous but marred by minor shooting mishaps that authorities were anxious to eliminate. The Sunday World-Herald on ...
John Nelson
What We Found
Picnic Mishaps
Picnicking is one of the most enjoyable summer pastimes, and Nebraskans more than one hundred years ago enjoyed it as much as we do today. Occasionally, however, these ...
Spitting Prohibited!
During the late nineteenth century spittoons became a common feature of saloons, hotels, stores, banks, railway carriages, and other places where adult men gathered. ...
A Surprising Foot Race
Many community celebrations and smaller gatherings in early Nebraska included foot racing. The popularity of foot racing as a competitive sport is revealed by a ...
Thayer’s Invention
John Nelson's photograph of a baseball game includes a catcher with face mask in the left foreground. NSHS RG3542:PH:097-12
The catcher's mask in baseball was ...
Those Fish Stories
Improbable fishing yarns have been around as long as fish and fishing. The Norfolk Weekly News-Journal in the summer of 1907 reported an escalating series of such tales ...
Will Pigs Help Win the War?
After the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover head of the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover believed ...
How They Hitch
"It was a dull day," the Omaha Daily Bee reporter explained to his readers on November 29, 1881. "The trains were all on time and carried only the usual quota of ...
A New Leaf for the New Year
A discarded stack of reporters' assignment books provided the Omaha Daily Bee with the topic for a New Year's column published on the first day of 1900. The Bee first ...
The Fading Horse
The rise of the automobile and the corresponding decline of the horse was well underway by 1909, especially in urban areas. The Omaha Daily News of August 22, 1909, ...
Free Auto Camps
Long distance travel in the early days of the automobile was difficult, and comforts along the way were few. Motorists pitched their own tents and cooked their own meals ...
Coal Prices Rise: The Price of Heat in 1909
Rising natural gas prices during cold weather are a reminder of an earlier generation's problems with the rising cost of other fuels. The Omaha Daily News on December 1, ...
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