Nebraska Authors

Aughey was professor of natural science at the University of Nebraska from 1871-1883/4. He helped found the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Nebraska Academy of Sciences, serving as the Academy's first President. Although he published practical work on soils, geology and various agricultural concerns, many of his publications were more concerned with promoting settlement in Nebraska than with factual accuracy. He was a strong proponent of the "rain follows the plow" doctrine that farming the land increases the rainfall on that land, a then popular but entirely false idea. He also speculated in real estate promotions and in his own ideas about the presence of coal in Nebraska. His speculations led to a scandal in 1883 that eventually forced his resignation from the University.

The on-line Encyclopedia of the Great Plains has a longer and more detailed biographical sketch of Aughey.
The on-line history of the University of Nebraska has a page titled "Aughey's Scandals."
The Nebraska State Historical Society has hosted a page describing Aughey's contribution to the control of grasshopper infestations in the 1870s.

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Thomas Mangelsen says he took his first wildlife photos while accompanying his father on hunting trips near Nebraska's Platte River. These hunting trips taught him the patience necessary for good wildlife photography, and he learned how to move quietly and understand animal behavior. Mangelsen has photographed wildlife in such far-flung places as New Zealand, the Arctic, and Yellowstone, but Mangelsen's first muse was Nebraska and the Platte River, where he returns regularly to photograph the great crane migrations.

Mangelsen has collaborated with many authors over the years to illustrate their books with his stunning photography, but he has also published solo work, including The Natural World: Portraits of Earth's Great Ecosystems, featuring a foreword by Jane Goodall. He has a background in biology and zoology, and is an advocate for conservation of the natural world. Mangelsen co-founded The Cougar Fund, was a founding Fellow of The International League of Conservation Photographers, is on the international advisory council for the Jane Goodall Institute, and acts as a board ambassador for the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance.

See also: Michael Forsberg, Joel Sartore

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Alvin S. Johnson is famed as a co-founder of the New School for Social Research in New York in 1919. He led the institution for over 20 years, and as such he also led the effort to bring over and employ immigrant scholars threatened by Nazism before and during World War II.

As he was born in a log house near Homer, NE, he self identified as a pioneer and a Midwesterner. At the University of Nebraska, he studied along side Dorothy Canfield (aka Dorothy Canfield Fisher), Willa Cather, and Louise Pound. He graduated with a degree in Classics, served in the Spanish-American war, and earned a doctorate in Economics from Columbia University in New York in 1902. He served as the economics editor of the liberal magazine New Republic at its founding. In the face of the nativist and illiberal atmosphere that accompanied World War I, he joined Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, and other scholars in founding The New School in New York in 1919. In 1923, he was made the New School's director, and he soon brought both Willa Cather and Roscoe Pound to its board of directors.

As scholars, especially Jewish scholars, sought to flee fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, Johnson, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, led an effort to bring important European scholars to the New School. Many of those scholars, ranging from Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt, to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, would not have survived without the effort led by Johnson. Many of these scholars would teach at the New School.

He wrote almost 1000 articles and books, and was a tireless campaigner for social reforms. He is said to have written much of the eight volume 1927 (first edition) of The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He also wrote a readable and informative autobiography, Pioneer's Progress, published in 1952.

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