This reproducible book is an introduction to your great state. Kids will learn about their state history, geography, presidents, people, places, nature, animals, and much more by completing these enriching activities.

German immigrant August Scherneckau served with the First Nebraska Volunteers from 1862 through 1865. Depicting the unit's service in Missouri, Arkansas, and Nebraska Territory, he offers detail, insight, and literary quality matched by few other accounts of the Civil War in the West. His observations provide new perspective on campaigns, military strategy, leadership, politics, ethnicity, emancipation, and many other topics.

A resonant true story of small-town politics and community perseverance and of decent people and questionable choices, Zoo Nebraska is a timely requiem for a rural America in the throes of extinction. Royal, Nebraska, population eighty-one--where the church, high school, and post office each stand abandoned, monuments to a Great Plains town that never flourished. But for nearly twenty years, they had a zoo, seven acres that rose from local peculiarity to key tourist attraction to devastating tragedy. And it all began with one man's outsize vision. When Dick Haskin's plans to assist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda were cut short by her murder, Dick's devotion to primates didn't die with her. He returned to his hometown with Reuben, an adolescent chimp, in the bed of a pickup truck and transformed a trailer home into the Midwest Primate Center. As the tourist trade multiplied, so did the inhabitants of what would become Zoo Nebraska, the unlikeliest boon to Royal's economy in generations and, eventually, the source of a power struggle that would lead to the tragic implosion of Dick Haskin's dream.

Stories of the heartland by the National Book Award finalist and author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. “Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate…References to America’s heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what’s close to American hearts, what connects us: dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these tales are about American obsessions past and present.” –The Washington Post Book World “Just as Raymond Carver came to be identified with a Pacific Northwest populated by blue-collar workers, and just as Richard Ford has crafted a Montana full of drifters, so Ron Hansen has carved out his own geographical niche. His Nebraska is a distinctive mix of 19th century settlers and 1980s breadwinners, of sudden storms and life-long yearnings, of lost souls stranded in the middle of nowhere.” –USA Today “Beautifully crafted stories… Wickedness, evil, malice is called by name; and for Hansen’s people the snake in the garden never fails to appear.” —The New York Times “Breathtaking virtuosity…These short narratives are utterly clean and smooth; they click together like a collection of river-washed stones that are each remarkably different yet polished by the same hand.”—Publishers Weekly

At the age of 17, Randall Hunsacker shoots his mother's boyfriend, steals a car and comes close to killing himself. His second chance lies in a small Nebraska farm town, where the landmarks include McKibben's Mobil Station, Frmka's Superette, and a sign that says The Wages of Sin is Hell. This is Goodnight, a place so ingrown and provincial that Randall calls it "Sludgeville"-until he starts thinking of it as home. In this pitch-perfect novel, Tom McNeal explores the currents of hope, passion, and cruelty beneath the surface of the American heartland. In Randall, McNeal creates an outcast whose redemption lies in Goodnight, a strange, small, but ultimately embracing community where Randall will inspire fear and adulation, win the love of a beautiful girl and nearly throw it all away.

This book tells the remarkable but virtually unknown story of how the quiet, conservative residents of a small, poor Nebraska community refused to be seduced by the oratory of the people than run this country, or by the offer of $3 million a year for 40 years (despite the fact that the economy of the community was extremely depressed) - and tenaciously fought the powers-that-be (i.e., the state government, the federal government, and Bechtel) against locating a low-level nuclear waste dump site in its backyard. Boyd County's right-wing farmers rose up in revolt, and eventual victory. It took them a decade of bitter struggle, but it transformed a small group of farmers from isolationist rebels to ardent environmentalists, altered the scope of the U.S.'s nuclear waste policy, and moved a fly-over state to change from Republican to Democrat.; Well researched (as the author has worked from hundreds of source documents and 10,000 pages of transcribed interviews), this engaging, witty book will undoubtedly get publicity and will catch the imagination of a large cross-section of Americans today who are, once again, inclined to trust neither our government nor the powerful multinational corporations that, once again, may not have our people's best interests at heart.

"This book details the history, culture, geography and government of Nebraska."--Provided by publisher.