Nebraska's capital — Big Red football country, sandhill cranes, and prairie architecture
Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska and home to the University of Nebraska, whose Cornhuskers football program is a genuine religion in the Great Plains. On game days, Memorial Stadium becomes the third-largest city in the state. The Nebraska State Capitol, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and completed in 1932, is one of the most beautiful in the country — a soaring tower rising from a flat prairie with extraordinary Byzantine-inspired interior mosaics. Every spring, the nearby Platte River hosts the world's largest gathering of sandhill cranes, half a million birds stopping on their mig…
Lincoln was chosen as Nebraska's capital in 1867, partly because it was far enough from Omaha that neither city could dominate the other. The University of Nebraska was founded the same year, and the two institutions have shaped the city ever since. The Great Plains frontier experience — homesteading, drought, the Dust Bowl, agricultural boom and bust — is woven into Lincoln's identity. Willa Cather, who grew up in Red Cloud to the south and attended the University of Nebraska, drew on this landscape for her great prairie novels including 'O Pioneers!' and 'My Ántonia.'