The largest city in Nebraska, Omaha is named for the Native American people who lived here until they signed a treaty with the federal government on June 24, 1854. Opportunists across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa, who had been waiting for the new territory to open, then rushed to stake out property, triggering a real estate boom. Omaha also saw the trial of Standing Bear, chief of the Ponca Tribe, which established the precedent that Native Americans were human beings and entitled to constitutional rights and protections.

During early boom times steamboats docked in Omaha daily, bringing gold-seekers and emigrants to be outfitted for the long journey west. Local merchants further prospered when Omaha was named the eastern terminus for the Union Pacific. The first rail was laid in 1865. Public buildings rose on the prairie; schools, plants, and stockyards flourished in the 1870s and 1880s. Fighting tornadoes, grasshopper plagues, floods, and drought, the people built one of the farm belt's great commercial and industrial cities.

Today, Omaha continues to be a major transportation and agribusiness center, but it is also a recognized leader in telecommunications, insurance, and manufacturing as well as the home of five Fortune 500 companies. Omaha is also the headquarters of STRATCOM, the Strategic Air Command, one of the vital links in the national defense chain.

Visitors are not in Omaha long before hearing the term "AKsarben." It is, in fact, only Nebraska spelled backward and the name of a civic organization.