A 500-word essay giving the history of the United
States by Nebraska student William Andrew Burkett was selected as the college-age group winner in a 1934 competition,
and that essay was placed on the Entablature on a bronze plate in 1973.
The delta of the Mississippi River is the most vulnerable location in the nation to global warming, because it is sinking at the same time sea
level is rising,” said Virginia Burkett, a senior researcher at the National Wetlands Research
Center in Lafayette and one of the nation's foremost experts on climate change.