About Nebraska

Nebraska occupies the geographic heart of the American continent, a vast, rolling state of 77,000 square miles where the Great Plains stretch from the Missouri River bluffs in the east to the High Plains buttes and badlands of the western Panhandle. It is a state that has been crossed, settled, plowed, grazed, and irrigated for more than a century and a half, yet still contains landscapes of wild beauty that most Americans have never seen: the 19,000-square-mile Nebraska Sandhills, the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere; the Niobrara River canyon; the weathered volcanic ash formations of the Panhandle; and the Platte River valley, where half a million Sandhill Cranes descend every spring in one of the great wildlife spectacles on Earth.

Nebraska is the Cornhusker State, the name says everything about the agricultural economy that built it. Corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, and hogs underpin everything else. But Nebraska also punches far above its weight in unexpected ways: Omaha is home to Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett; US Strategic Command controls the entire American nuclear arsenal from Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue; and Nebraska's unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, the only one of its kind in the nation, is a democratic experiment now nearly nine decades old.

Nebraska's history is written in the wagon ruts still visible at Scotts Bluff, in the sod house foundations disappearing into the prairie, in the Art Deco tower of the State Capitol rising above Lincoln's plains, and in the persistent optimism of a people who built a life in one of the most demanding climates in North America.