NEBRASKA 



4100 



NEBRASKA 



1906, she signed a contract to play in English in 

 November of that year. Perseverance, hard 

 study and close application enabled her to meet 

 the terms of her contract, and she made her 

 first appearance before a New York audience in 

 Ibsen's A Doll's House, which was followed by 

 Htdda Gablcr, Little Eyolf and The Master 

 Builder. A vaudeville tour in 1915, in which 

 she appeared in a one-act play called War 

 . was highly successful and occasioned 

 much favorable comment; in 1917 'Ctption 

 Shoals was equally well received, though the 

 theme was morbid. When not busy on the 

 stage Mme. Nazimova takes delight in land- 

 scape gardening; in private life she is the wife 

 of an actor, Charles Bryant. 



NE'BO, MOUNT, a mountain overlooking the 

 land of Canaan, from the peak of which Moses 



saw the Promised Land, and on which he died 

 and was buried (see Deuteronomy XXXII, 49). 

 Mount Nebo is supposed to be Jebel Neba, 

 a ridge eight miles east of the mouth of the 

 Jordan River, on the eastern shore of the Dead 

 Sea, near its northern end. and m:.y have been 

 a shrine of the Babylonian and Assyrian god, 

 Nebo. The burial of Moses is the theme of a 

 poem by Cecil Frances Alexander, a stanza of 

 which follows. The poem succeeds well in giv- 

 ing an atmosphere of loneliness and awe: 



On Nebo's lonely mountain. 



By this side Jordan's wave 

 In ;i vale in the land of Moab, 



There lies a lonely gravr. 

 And no man made that sepulchre, 



And no man saw it e'er, 

 For the angel of God upturned the sod, 



And placed the dead man there. 



(EBRAS'KA, the TREE-PLANTER STATE, 

 a prairie state of great agricultural wealth, a 

 region of golden fields of corn and grain and 

 great, grassy plains, belonging to the north- 

 central group of the United States. Its name 

 is derived from a North American Indian word 

 meaning broad water, which was given to the 

 large river of the state, commonly known by its 

 French name, the Platte, also meaning shallow 

 water. The goldenrod, so abundant in Ne- 

 braska fields, has appropriately been chosen 

 the state flower. 



Size and Location. Ranking fifteenth in size 

 among the states of the Union, Nebraska has 

 an area of 77,520 square miles, which is only 

 slightly less than that of South Dakota. The 

 state is rectangular in shape, except where cut 

 off on the southwest corner by Colorado and on 

 the eastern border by the Missouri River. Its 

 length from east to west is more than twice its 

 width from north to south. 



People. With a population of 1,192,214, aver- 

 aging 15.5 per square mile, in 1910, Nebraska 

 ranked twenty-ninth among the commonwealths 

 of the United States. On January 1, 1917, the 

 population was estimated by the Census Bureau 

 at 1,277,750. About one-third of the foreign- 



born whites are from Germany. There are over 

 7,500 negroes in the state, and in 1915 there 

 were 3,917 Indians in the state reservations, 

 chiefly of the Omaha, Sante Sioux, Winnebago 

 and Ponca tribes. 



A large proportion of the population live in 

 the southern and eastern counties, and the arid 

 section of the west is very sparsely settled. 

 Almost three-fourths of the inhabitants live on 

 farms or in rural communities, and there are 

 only five cities having a population of over 

 10,000. Omaha, of which the estimated num- 

 ber of inhabitants in 1917 was 165,470, is the 

 largest city, followed by Lincoln, South Omaha, 

 Grand Island and Hastings. 



Only about thirty per cent of the inhabitants 

 of the state are church members. Over one- 

 fourth of these are Roman Catholics, and the 

 Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Christian, 

 Baptist and Congregational denominations are 

 next in order in numerical strength. 



Education. The efficiency and excellence of 

 Nebraska's school system is shown in the fact 

 that the percentage of illiteracy (1.9) is lower 

 than that of any other state in the Union, ex- 

 cept Iowa and Oregon. Special attention has 

 recently been given to agricultural training in 



