Omaha

While Elvis Presley, famed “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” didn’t have direct ties to Nebraska, Omaha and Lincoln were the sites for two of his final performances in the summer of 1977.

An 1890s Omaha photo shows three young women dressed in what look like men’s military cadet uniforms. It was frowned upon for women to be dressed in such a manner, so why were they?

"I guess there ain’t any end to Omaha,” wrote sixteen-year-old Frisby Rasp in a letter to his parents in 1888. “You can walk till you are tired out in any direction you choose, and the houses are as thick as ever….” Rasp's letters show us how the city looked, sounded, and smelled to an 1880s farm boy.

Marker Location 

2014-2232 Dodge St, Omaha, Douglas County, Nebraska;

View this marker's location.

What was a valuable racehorse doing on the icy Missouri River in January 1882? Men from a local packinghouse mobilized, but would they save the horse before it was swept under the ice?

Omaha was shocked when the wife of a Florence real estate man was brutally murdered in 1917. A suspect was soon in custody, but was he the right man?

The South Omaha butchers conceived the idea that it would be fun to stay away and play a practical joke on their Council Bluffs brethren, . . . They sent a defiant challenge to the Missouri Valley boys [near the picnic site at Loveland] to be on hand with all of their best fighters for South Omaha was coming up there to clean out all western Iowa.

In 1962 Nebraskans organized the largest mass vaccination campaign in the state’s history. An estimated 1 million Nebraskans drank polio vaccine at a series of “Sabin Oral Sunday” events that year.

Why is this young man all shook up? Elvis Presley performed at the University of Nebraska Coliseum on May 19, 1956, and at the Omaha Civic Auditorium the next day. This photo from the Omaha show appeared on the World-Herald's front page.

Ten percent of Nebraskans are Latino, part of a statewide community that is more than a century old. At first it was specifically a Mexican and Mexican-American community. The Spring 2019 issue of Nebraska History tells the story of the early decades.