Nebraska Authors

Wood is Emeritus Professor of Athropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is a prolific author of works of interest to professional scholars as well as some works of interest to the wider public. He has served on boards governing the Smithsonian Institution's and the National Park Service's archaeological work. He has honors too numerous to list here.

Wood's 2003 book Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition is included in the Center for Great Plains Studies listing of Great Books of the Great Plains for Nebraska. It describes a 1797 expedition that attempted to establish a trading post in what is now northeast Nebraska, while the area was still part of the Spanish Empire. Lewis and Clark would borrow from the expedition's maps and reports in planning their own expedition beginning in 1804.

His 2002 book, Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited, received the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's 53rd Western Heritage Awards Wrangler Award for co-authorship of Best Book on Art in August 2014. He also received the High Plains Book Award for Art and Photography from the Billings Public Library in Montana on October 26, 2014.

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Angelia Thurston Newman built an influential career as a social reform activist from within the Episcopal Methodist Church, as a church and temperance lecturer, and as Western Secretary of the Foreign Missionary Society of the Church. She was one of the first five women to be elected to the General Conference of the Episcopal Methodist Church in 1888. (She was said to have been the first woman delegate so elected, but four other women were elected in the same year.) That year women were not allowed to be seated at the General Conference, but would be allowed to be seated in 1904 and 1908. She had a 27 year career as Superintendent of Prison Work for National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, working out of Lincoln, Nebraska. She was affiliated with a number of other charities and social reform programs. She was a very influential Methodist opponent of Mormonism, and through her church served in an unpaid capacity as a representative of Utah gentiles in the Forty-ninth, Fiftieth, and Fifty-first Congresses. Her papers on the "Mormon problem" were widely read and were reprinted by the U.S. Senate for congressional use.

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Harm, who grew up in Lincoln, describes himself as a "scholar of the life and works of Art Deco Architectural sculptor Lee Oskar Lawrie, photographer and author." Harm became a life-long enthusiast for Lawrie after encountering Lawrie's works at the Nebraska State Capitol. His 2009 book, Lee Lawrie's Prairie Deco: History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol provides us with what have been recognized as some of the most impressive photographs ever made of Lawrie's work, both at grand scale, and in unique perspectives of detail. Reviewers have also noted that Harm is not a trained art scholar, and in his writing he offers a somewhat idiosyncratic appreciation or fellow artist's insight into what Lawrie is up to. He continues to have interesting things to say about Lawrie.

Harm's book Lee Lawrie's Prairie Deco: History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol, has been revised and expanded in several editions since its original publication in 2009, including a fourth edition in 2018. Additions include new photographs and references to other examples of Lawrie's work.

See: Robert Haller, "Review of Lee Lawrie's Prairie Deco: History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol by Gregory Paul Harm," 2011 UNL digital commons (originally from the Great Plains Quarterly). Katherine M. Skolnik, "History in Stone at the Nebraska State Capitol," (book review) in Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine, Spring, 2018.

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