I’m very excited to announce that Nebraska Newspapers has recently added more than 100,000 pages of historic Nebraska newspapers. New titles are (in alphabetical order): The American Citizen, The Beatrice Daily Express, the Cedar County Wachter, The Gordon Journal, Gwiazda Zachodu (The Western Star), The Nebraska Staats-Zeitung, The Powder Keg, The South Omaha Stockman, and The Woman’s Tribune. Changes can also be seen in The O’Neill Frontier, The Plattsmouth Journal, and the Plattsmouth Herald.
This is so much great new content, and we plan on writing about it in three posts. In this first post, I’m going to look at our community/regionally significant papers.
Gordon Journal
The Gordon Journal was selected based on the longevity of the newspaper, its location in the northern Panhandle where we don’t have a lot of previously digitized content, its proximity to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and – we were hoping – its publication in the German language.
So, here’s a page of the Gordon Journal. And, it’s a little small, but if you look carefully, you will see that it is in English, despite its catalog record which says it’s in English and German. Established in 1891, there is no German at all until March 18, 1915.
Why that start date for German? First, I thought maybe it was a new editor or publisher, but no, the nearest publishing change was January 1, 1914. Then I thought maybe it was the start of World War I, but, no, the war started on July 28, 1914. That it’s always 2 columns, never more, never less, indicates that maybe it was some sort of syndicated content. An accompanying column says “This week we give our German readers a little war news in their own tongue. This feature will be kept for a few weeks and if our friends appreciate it, we will continue it as long as the war lasts.”
But that’s not what happened. On February 15, 1917, the last German column appears, with an accompanying article on page 12. “Nationality has been forgotten. We are not Germans, or Britons, or Frenchmen, or Austrians, or Italians, or people of any other land but this. We are Americans – of one heart, one soul, and one purpose.” The U.S. enters the war on April 6.
There is never any more German content up to the present day — the paper is still in publication as the Sheridan County Journal Star — but there is plenty of coverage of Gordon and the surrounding communities, farms, and ranches.
O’Neill Frontier
Begun in previous grant cycles, the O’Neill Frontier is an important title from North Central Nebraska. We have just put up the last 7300 pages of the paper, completing the run from the paper’s founding in 1880 to our cutoff date mandated by the Library of Congress of 1963.
One important find in the O’Neill paper is a small announcement at the top of page 8 in the April 6, 1961, issue that invites the O’Neill public to a presentation by Bea Pappenheimer. Known in later life as Bea Karp, she moved to O’Neill, Nebraska after surviving a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. In her oral testimonies, Bea recalls being motivated by the 1961 trial of Nazi perpetrator Adolph Eichmann to speak about her experiences being rescued from the Gurs concentration camp and hidden in French chateaus and convents for the remainder of the war.
This small news story is just one example of Nebraska scholars and genealogists being able to use our digitized papers for research.
The Plattsmouth newspapers
While no new content has gone live for the Plattsmouth Herald and the Plattsmouth Journal (all content was already online through 1963), the Journal is now searchable as one paper.
A small hiccup occurred in our original digitization process: Each newspaper in Nebraska that has been cataloged has both a Library of Congress Call Number for the original, print version of the paper and, if microfilmed, a microfilm LCCN. When the papers were digitized, the first batch of papers used one LCCN, while the second batch used the other. Neither was incorrect, but it did lead to them appearing as two separate papers on our website. They now appear as one newspaper, as they should be, helping users more easily find the content they are seeking.
With the assistance of Plattsmouth City Historian Harlan Seyfer, we have also posted title essays for both the Journal and the Herald. The title essays give background on publication dates, the editors and publishers, the political leanings, and some controversies between the papers. Upon the folding of the rival Herald in 1912, the Journal celebrated the victory, calling the Herald “arrogant and condescending” and questioning the Herald’s previous financial dealings. The Louisville Courier observed, “the old hull went down like a rotten potato in a bucket of swill.”
Next: More about our foreign language papers.