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Mad Queen of the Prairies Humanities Speaker

The ‘Mad’ Queen of the Prairies

February 26 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

| FREE

Join us Feb. 26, from 2-4 p.m., for a FREE program. No RSVP is needed.

“How do you establish a territory?” Probably not the Nebraska way, where the seat of government shifted from town to town, where governors were changing every year – sometimes every few months – and where the banks printed their own money. Yet Nebraska was where an Indian chief was once governor and where women very nearly won the vote for the first time. Humanities speaker, Jeff Barnes, shares the rarely-seen images and seldom-heard stories of the unconventional, dysfunctional first years of the Nebraska Territory, a place newspapers called the “Queen of the Prairies.”

Jeff has found a great amount of forgotten information on pre-Civil War Nebraska and will show and tells of things you have probably never seen nor heard before, such as historical maps of a Nebraska which dwarfed Texas; the 1853 provisional government of William Walker, a Wyandotte Indian chief; the very first image of Omaha City from 1855 as well as images of our “ad hoc” capitols; and the serious consideration the 1856 territorial legislature gave to women’s suffrage, which would have been the nation’s first.

Humanities Nebraska (HN) provides major funding for this program. HN receives support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Nebraska State Legislature, the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, and private donations.

More about the Speaker: Jeff Barnes
A fifth-generation Nebraskan, Jeff Barnes is a former newspaper reporter and editor, trustee with the Nebraska State Historical Society, past chairman of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission, and former marketing director for the Durham Museum. He is the author of “Forts of the Northern Plains,”, “The Great Plains Guide to Custer,” and “The Great Plains Guide to Buffalo Bill.”

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