Nebraska Authors

Student of and eventual successor to Erwin Barbour as Director of the Nebraska State Museum (Morrill Hall), Schultz joined Morrill Hall staff in 1927, earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska in 1931, and succeeded Erwin Barbour as Director of the State Museum in 1941, the same year Schultz received his doctoral degree from the University.

For over five seasons of exploring and collecting, beginning in 1929, Schultz was to lead the famed South Party expedition, which enriched the collections of Morrill Hall and transformed the study of vertebrate paleontology and early man in North America. The South Party eventually also included the young Loren Eiseley and T. Mylan Stout. In 1973, some forty years later, Eiseley dedicated a book of poetry "to the bone hunters of the old South Party... 1931-1933.. and to C. Bertrand Schultz." The digs also cemented the partnership between Schultz and Mylan Stout, who would be life-long scientific collaborators.

Schultz (always working together with his wife, paleontologist Marian Schultz), Erwin Barbour, and T. Mylan Stout are among the most distinguished of American vertebrate paleontologists, founders of modern American vertebrate paleontology.

Schultz published hundreds of scientific articles with his wife and research partner. They studied in over 60 countries. Schultz represented the University for over 35 years in a cooperative paleontologic and geologic research project with the Frick Laboratory of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During his tenure as the Director of Morrill Hall, Schultz enhanced the fossil collections, saw the opening of the Ralph Mueller planetarium and numerous exhibits at the museum. Schultz helped found and lead the Nebraska Academy of Science.

The Lincoln City Libraries Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors Archive includes the Loren Eiseley--C. Bertrand Schultz correspondence, 1934-1978 in the Nebraska Academy of Sciences Eiseley Donation.

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Starita has two Pulitzer Prize nominations, one for investigative reporting with the Miami Herald, the other for his book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, 1995. Dull Knifes was a Book of the Month Club, History Book Club and Quality Paperback selection and has been translated into six foreign languages. Starita had a distinguished 12 year career with the Miami Herald, which including local and investigative reporting as well as serving as that newspaper's New York bureau chief from 1983 to 1987. He has served as City Editor for the Lincoln Journal Star, and is currently professor of journalism at UNL. He has received numerous awards for both his journalism and his books on Native Americans.

Asked about influences, Starita has cited a period of extensive travel and varied work after he left school in the early 1970s, and the practice of journalism, which he says "forces you to be able to organize and present information in a coherent and readable package--often under field deadline pressure." He also cites the literary influences of writers: "Mark Twain (because he could tell a good story with a powerful message as well as anyone)--Willa Cather (because she understood the powerful relationship between the land and the people of the midwest)--and Wallace Stegner (because he conveyed the great subtlety and beauty of the Great Plains better than anyone)."

In 2012 Starita started the Chief Standing Bear Journey for Justice Scholarship Fund, which awards six to eight scholarships annually to Nebraska Native American high school graduates.

Starita's 2009 book I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice, was the 2011 One Book One Lincoln selection and the One Book One Nebraska selection for 2012.

See also other recent authors with interest in Native Americans: Alan Boye, Stew Magnuson, David Wishart, and John R. Wunder.

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Margaret Jacobs is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at UNL, and served as the director of Womens and Gender Studies from 2006-2011. She was the 2015-16 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in England. Before working at UNL, she taught at Mexico State University from 1997-2004. Jacobs is the author of over a dozen articles and three books. She has lectured widely in England, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Studies. Jacobs specializes in Colonialism and Decolonization, Indigenous Peoples, Native Americans, the North American West, and Women. She has been a consultant on several films that are related to American Indian adoption and American Indian Women. Jacobs studies the history of the American West, and is interested in cross-cultural relations between women in the American West and other colonial settings. Her books include Endangered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (1999), White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (2009), and A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (2014).

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