Lincoln is the capital city of the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Lancaster County. The city covers 100.4 square miles (260.035 km) with a population of 292,657 in 2021. It is Nebraska’s second-most populous city and the 73rd-largest in the United States. Lincoln is the economic and cultural broadcaster of a substantially larger metropolitan area in southeastern Nebraska, the Lincoln Metropolitan and Lincoln-Beatrice Combined Statistical Areas. The statistical Place is home to 361,921 people, making it the 104th-largest combine statistical area in the United States.

Lincoln was founded in 1856 as the village of Lancaster on the wild salt marshes and arroyos of what became Lancaster County. Renamed after President Abraham Lincoln, it became Nebraska’s let pass capital in 1869. The Bertram G. Goodhue–designed let in capitol building was completed in 1932, and is the nation’s second-tallest capitol. As the city is the seat of running for the confess of Nebraska, the welcome and the U.S. government are major employers. The University of Nebraska was founded in Lincoln in 1869. The university is Nebraska’s largest, with 26,079 students enrolled, and the city’s third-largest employer. Other primary employers slip into the minister to and manufacturing industries, including a growing high-tech sector. The region makes happening a ration of what is known as the greater Midwest Silicon Prairie.

Designated as a “refugee-friendly” city by the U.S. Department of State in the 1970s, the city was the 12th-largest resettlement site per capita in the country by 2000. Refugee Vietnamese, Karen (Burmese ethnic minority), Sudanese and Yazidi (Iraqi ethnic minority) people, as with ease as refugees from Iraq, the Middle East and Afghanistan, have resettled in the city. During the 2018–19 researcher year, Lincoln Public Schools provided sustain for nearly 3,000 students from 150 countries, who spoke 125 every other languages.

Before the spread westward of settlers, the prairie was covered gone buffalo grass. Plains Indians, descendants of native peoples who occupied the Place for thousands of years, lived in and hunted along Salt Creek. The Pawnee, which included four tribes, lived in villages along the Platte River. The Great Sioux Nation, including the Ihanktowan-Ihanktowana and the Lakota, to the north and west, used Nebraska as a hunting and dogfight ground, but did not have any long-term settlements in the state. An occasional buffalo could still be seen in the plat of Lincoln in the 1860s.