Nebraska Authors

After an early career in education, Scher was a pioneer in creating interactive digital study guides as a software writer and partner at StudyWare. He came to Lincoln in the early 1990s when StudyWare was acquired by Cliffs Notes. After Cliffs Notes closed its software group, he moved to Texas as an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishers. He soon returned to Lincoln to work at Class.com and then moved to Sandhills Publishing, where he had freelanced, as publication editor for Smart Computing magazine. He continues to work for Sandhills in cybersecurity. He is known as an editor of nautical history books, and he continues freelance writing on digital technology. His 2016 book, Leveling the Playing Field: The Democratization of Technology is a detail rich study of how the new tools technology creates trickle down to down to the masses and how that can transform our social and cultural world. The book has been widely praised by other technology writers.

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Berens serves as Associate Dean in the College of Journalism at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She served for 14 years as editor and co-publisher of the Seward, Nebraska newspaper. Many of her books have focused on themes unique to Nebraska politics and Nebraska political figures. Her book on state senator Jerome Warner is the only book length study of a towering figure in Nebraska politics. Her book Power to the People explored the historical origins of Nebraska's unicameral legislature in early twentieth century populism and progressivism. A later book explored the Unicameral's successes and failures. She has written a biography of former United States Senator and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

Berens was elected to the Nebraska Press Association Hall of Fame in 2011.

Writers who address related political themes: Robert Cherny on populism and progressivism in Nebraska, and in American history broadly conceived, John Hicks and Christopher Lasch.

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Edgar Beecher Bronson was a Nebraska rancher and author. Nephew of famed abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, Edgar Beecher came west in 1877 to start his own ranch in Sioux County, Nebraska. He was a protégé of famous geologist and businessman Clarence King. From his ranch, he ran cattle on the Niobrara and White rivers from 1877-1882. He witnessed events surrounding the last Lakota Sun Dance and the Cheyenne outbreak. He wrote his well known memoir of ranch life in 1908 from memory. More of a storyteller and adventurer than a historian, he has been reproached for inaccuracies in his memoir. His sometimes extensive use of cowboy dialect has also irritated some readers. Despite defects, his account is regarded as a "cow country classic" and, as one-time Director of the Nebraska State Historical Society W.D. Aeschbacher noted, it helped shape popular understanding of the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

See Anne DeCorey, “Edgar Beecher Bronson, Nebraska's 'Ranchman,'" Nebraska History, 81 (2000): 106-115.

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