THIS STORY IS FEATURED IN THE 2024 NEW FRONTIERS MAGAZINE
By TYLER ELLYSON
UNK Communications
KEARNEY – If you want to learn about Nathan Tye’s research interests, spend some time in his office.
The University of Nebraska at Kearney associate history professor will gladly give you a tour of his mini museum.
“I have a really bad eBay habit,” he says while pulling seemingly random objects from boxes, drawers and shelves. “I spend a lot of time at local antique stores, too.”
The collection on display inside Copeland Hall includes “a little bit of everything.” There are photos signed by former Nebraska Congressman, presidential nominee and U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, one-room schoolhouse records, a young girl’s diary from the Great Depression, high school newspapers dating back more than 100 years, a ledger documenting tree sales in the Nebraska Territory and a wooden gas attack alarm from World War I.
“My students love and hate this thing,” Tye says while holding the spinning rattle used by Allied soldiers. “I always bring it to class when I teach them about World War I. It’s really loud.”
Numerous items from UNK’s past can also be found among the “hodgepodge of important stuff.” He has paper fans promoting summer classes at the Nebraska State Normal School, a handwritten copy of the Class of 1908 fight song, a Zippo lighter featuring Kearney State College and the former Administration Building and a program from the Nebraska State Teachers College senior dance in 1939.
“I think Calvin T. Ryan was the chaperone for that dance,” Tye casually notes, referencing the former English professor and namesake for the campus library.
Even the chairs in Tye’s office have history. They were previously used by Herbert Cushing, president of the Nebraska State Teachers College at Kearney from 1936 to 1961.
“Those are on long-term loan from the university archives, because they don’t have the space for them,” Tye explains.
So why does a millennial keep this old stuff?
“It’s the history that defines who we are today,” Tye says. “By learning that history, you feel centered. You get a better sense of who you are.”
The Kearney native uses UNK’s impact on his hometown as an example of the important connections between past and present.
“UNK is here for a reason, and the fact that UNK is here has radically altered the scope and scale of the potential of the city of Kearney and the wider possibilities for central and western Nebraska. A decision that was made by the Legislature shortly after the turn of the century to put a normal school here has radically altered hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. But it could have gone to any other community. It could have gone somewhere else.
“The opportunities, the possibilities, everything this university provides for people, came out of history.”
PROUD PAST
Tye’s fascination with family and community history began developing when he was a young boy.
“It’s almost like it was kind of predetermined,” he said of his career. “I’ve always been a historian, even as a little kid. I collected old stuff. I loved going antiquing and building little museum displays in shoe boxes.”
The most impactful experiences are even more vivid in his memory. He fondly recalls those moments at the dining room table, listening to his late grandfather Alfred Eugene Vigil share stories passed on from generations before him.
“Years just collapsed. You’re sitting around the dining room table and your grandfather is telling you about something that happened in 1720 as if it was yesterday,” Tye said.
A local historian and “keeper of the family history,” Vigil recorded conversations he had with Tye’s great-great-grandmother, who was born in a covered wagon in 1883. They’re speaking New Mexican Spanish, so Tye doesn’t understand the details, but he still keeps an audio file on his cellphone for inspiration.
“The past has always been this living, breathing thing,” he said. “It’s something you have to care for and maintain and cultivate.”
Tye’s father Tom is a third-generation Kearney attorney, with that side of the family playing a prominent part in the community since the 1920s. His great-grandfather Joseph served as mayor from 1943-47, and Tye proudly displays a service award his grandfather Tom Sr. received from former Kearney State President and UNK Chancellor William Nester.
He also has the nametag his grandmother Gloria wore when she was director of student health on campus, as well as an admissions packet sent shortly after his birth offering “extra early acceptance” into UNK.
Technically, Tye never attended UNK, but he was with his mother Mikki when she finished her bachelor’s degree in business administration in December 1988. Tom and Mikki welcomed their first child just 10 days after the graduation ceremony.
“So I graduated in utero,” Tye joked.
Tye earned bachelor’s degrees in history and theology from Creighton University and a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. However, he never lost his passion for Kearney and central Nebraska.
“My classmates in grad school got really sick and tired of me talking about Nebraska,” he said with a laugh. “They’d never met one of us before. They maybe had a vague sense of football and Warren Buffett, and that was about it. And I very quickly filled them with other facts that they didn’t need to know about.”
UNTOLD STORIES
Tye’s first interest as a researcher stemmed from his time between undergraduate and graduate school, when he worked at a homeless shelter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The people who came to St. Martin’s Hospitality Center had incredible stories to share, he said, but nobody was listening.
That led him to look into the lives of transient workers in the Great Plains in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These migrant laborers, better known as hobos, existed on the margins of society.
“They were everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” Tye said. “These are the folks who built roads and canals and harvested crops. Any manual labor that was required in much of the United States from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression was done by transient men riding the boxcars around.
“Communities desperately needed them, and absolutely hated them at the same time.”
Tye researched these laborers and their role in society for his doctoral dissertation and published his first article, “Billy Clubs and Vagrancy Laws: Confronting the ‘Plague of Hobos’ in Nebraska, 1870s-1930s,” in Nebraska History Magazine in 2018. History Nebraska awarded him the James L. Sellers Award for 2019, with judges from Chadron State College noting: “The author masterfully uses a wide range of primary sources to overcome the fragmentary nature of the archive and place the important and overlooked voice of hobos into Nebraska history.”
Tye continues to conduct research in this area. Another article, “‘A Flight of Alien, Unclean Birds’: The Mobility of Hobo Labor in Iowa 1870s–1910s,” was published in The Annals of Iowa, a State Historical Society of Iowa journal, in 2022, and he’s currently writing a book on the topic.
Labor history, the working class and “overlooked and marginalized communities” are among his focal points.
The UNK faculty member also researches Black homesteaders in Overton, and he’s on advisory boards for History Nebraska’s Historical Marker Equity Program and the Japanese Hall and History Project, located at the Legacy of the Plains Museum in Gering. This summer, he presented a lecture at the Buffalo County Historical Society’s Trails and Rails Museum on Albert Frederick Lewis, the first known Black lacrosse player.
Tipped off by a “random email” from a museum employee in Ontario, Canada, Tye and former Trails and Rails community engagement director Broc Anderson learned that Lewis was a goalie for the Cornwall Club and Canadian national team in the late 1800s. He immigrated to Kearney in 1892, opened a laundry business and started a successful lacrosse team that crisscrossed the state. Lewis passed away in 1915 and is buried in a local cemetery.
“His story is known in Canada, but he was never recognized here because we didn’t think to look for lacrosse,” Tye explained. “My hope is to get a historical marker installed for him.”
MAKING HISTORY ACCESSIBLE
As a rare book and manuscript collector, it’s no surprise that Tye’s interests also extend to literary history.
He’s written scholarly articles on Willa Cather’s ties to Kearney, Robert Henri’s relationship with poet Walt Whitman and the censorship of Mari Sandoz in the 1930s and ’40s. Tye serves on the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Board of Directors and works with high school educators each summer during the National Willa Cather Center Teacher Institute.
“I’m really interested in absences, those voids in people’s biographies,” he said. “What’s missing here? Or how can I shed light on something that’s overlooked? And it’s not necessarily just famous people. It’s stories of common people. It’s stories from the community.”
Talk to one of Tye’s colleagues and they’ll tell you he seems to have a new research project nearly every week. He doesn’t completely disagree.
Tye is always diving down rabbit holes and “following weird threads” in search of those little-known stories that add to the rich history of his hometown and state. He spends countless hours reading decades-old newspaper articles, scouring government documents and digging through the archives at UNK and local museums.
“My thought process is mildly chaotic, as evidenced by my office,” he said with a grin. “It’s really disorganized and disjointed, following a puzzle piece and trying to fit different things together.”
The result is often a fascinating tale that he shares with the public.
For example, did you know the first aviation mechanic lived in Kearney?
Charles Taylor had a business here before moving to Ohio, where he started working for the Wright brothers’ bicycle company. Taylor designed and built the engine for the Wright Flyer, which made the first sustained flight by an airplane in December 1903. He also served as chief mechanic for the first transcontinental flight, from New York to California, achieved by Cal Rodgers in 1911.
What do you know about the Explorer I balloon?
Tye found two photos at the G.W. Frank Museum of History and Culture on campus, then put together a presentation on the 1934 expedition that attempted to demonstrate the future feasibility of space travel by taking crew members to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The giant, hydrogen-filled balloon tore and exploded, forcing the three-man crew to parachute to safety before it crashed in a cornfield near Loomis.
Tye has given more than 50 public talks and lectures since joining UNK in 2019, covering topics as serious as a central Nebraska serial killer, as absurd as a reported UFO landing and alien abduction and as scandalous as Maude Gebhart and her late 19th century brothel. He’s presented for museums, historical societies and community organizations across the state and beyond its borders.
“I’ll speak anywhere,” said Tye, who organizes the monthly Brown Bag Lecture Series at Kearney Public Library. “The thing I always tell people is that you just need to buy me a cup of coffee and a tank of gas, because you’re already paying my salary. That’s part of the Extension ethos that I have for myself.”
Inspired by the late Kathy Oberdeck, his adviser at the University of Illinois, Tye has always been committed to public service and access, aiming to bring local history to new audiences.
“I want folks to feel as interested in and committed to the past as I do,” he said, “and this is a venue to do that. I could write a peer-reviewed article or publish a book – we all do that as part of our jobs – but I find it much more rewarding to give a presentation and then have folks come up to me afterward and share their stories.”
“That public engagement demonstrates the utility of historical research and the importance of local history,” he added. “And it gets people thinking.”
COMMUNITY RESOURCE
In addition to his involvement mentioned above, Tye serves on the boards of the G.W. Frank Museum and Buffalo County Historical Society, which selected him as its 2024 Volunteer of the Year. He played a key role in organizing a downtown birthday party and vintage baseball game as part of Kearney’s sesquicentennial celebration in 2023.
Tye is also part of Kearney Creates, a project documenting the city’s vibrant history of arts and culture. He frequently consults with area museums and historical societies on their collections and exhibits and helps local churches, social clubs and community organizations preserve and display their historic items.
Then there are the phone calls, usually from widows or children who don’t know what to do with something after a family member passes. They bring him farm records, military memorabilia, scrapbooks, letters and anything else with historical value.
Those possessions become part of the Copeland Hall collection until Tye can find them a permanent home.
“One of the real joys in this position is working with the community and being trusted that those treasured family objects will end up in the right place,” Tye said.
He understands that more than anyone.
PHOTOS BY ERIKA PRITCHARD, UNK COMMUNICATIONS
NATHAN TYE
Title: Associate Professor, History
College: Arts and Sciences
Education: Ph.D. in history, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019; Bachelor of Arts in history and theology, Creighton University, 2011.
Years at UNK: 5
Areas of Research/Specialization: United States history (post-1865); Nebraska history; community and local history; literary history; labor history; and gender and sexuality history. My research largely focuses on community and local history, digging through county archives, local museums and elsewhere to locate overlooked, little-known and fascinating histories of Kearney, central Nebraska and the Great Plains. This research has produced peer-reviewed articles on hobos in Nebraska and Iowa, Willa Cather’s ties to Kearney, and Robert Henri’s relationship with the poet Walt Whitman. In my five years at UNK, I’ve given more than 40 public lectures and talks across the state, appeared on NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” and frequently consulted with local museums and historical societies on their collections and exhibits. Taken together, my work aims to bring fresh views and stories from our local and community history to new readers and audiences.
Courses Taught: Nebraska in the World; American History Since 1865; The Historian’s Craft; History 466: Archives and Museums; Digital History; Nebraska and Great Plains History; The United States 1898-1941; America Interpreted; Readings in American History – Midwestern History; Readings in American History – Sports History; Readings in American History – History of Sexuality.
Recent Published Articles: “Willa Cather’s Ties to Kearney, Nebraska,” Willa Cather Review, 2022. “‘If You Call on Me I Will Tell You What I Know of Walt’: Unrecorded Assessment of Walter and Walt Whitman by William Booth, Brooklyn Carpenter,” The Walt Whitman Quarterly, 2023. “‘A Flight of Alien, Unclean Birds’: The Mobility of Hobo Labor in Iowa 1870s–1910s,” The Annals of Iowa, 2022.
