Anishinaabe (Sault Tribe) youth robotics inventor Danielle Boyer talks about how culturally grounded technology can reshape education, empower communities, and revitalize languages.

"Community Usability: Designing Communities for People (And Not the Other Way Around)" by Neil Linscheid, an Extension Professor and Extension State Specialist in Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota.

Featuring Athena Ramos (UNMC), Ted Hamann (UNL), and Annika Johnson (Joslyn Art Museum) talking on the importance of regional study on the Center for Great Plains Studies' 50th anniversary.

Larkin Powell, director of the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spoke about his new book, “The Best of Intentions: A Story of Landscape Change in the Heart of the Great Plains,” at the Center for Great Plains Studies.

Featuring Jesse Bell (UNMC), Michael Farrell (UNL), and Monique Bassey (UNL) talking on the importance of regional study on the Center for Great Plains Studies' 50th anniversary.

Rebecca Nagle talks about her book, "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" (Harper Collins Publishers, 2024), winner of the 2025 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize from the Center for Great Plains Studies. Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation living in Oklahoma. She is the writer and host of the podcast "This Land."

Featuring Liliana Bronner (UNMC), Chris Dando (UNO), and Larkin Powell (UNL)

On the 50th anniversary of the Center for Great Plains Studies, we talked with Founding Director Paul A. Olson about the early days.

It all started in Paul Olson’s kitchen. In the mid-1970s, several UNL faculty members met in the UNL English professor’s home to discuss creating a regional center dedicated to the study of the Great Plains. The talks bore fruit in 1976 when the University Board of Regents chartered the Center for Great Plains Studies. The Center had a humble beginning in offices housed in Oldfather Hall at the center of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s City Campus. Despite this location, the Center was founded as a four-campus entity, serving UNL, UNO, UNK, and UNMC, and Paul Olson became its first director.

Over the past 50 years, the Center has developed its Fellows program, annual conference, two scholarly journals, book projects, Olson lecture series, and countless projects. Its Great Plains Art Museum connects the community with the art of the region and serves as a gathering place for education and artistic expression.

On this episode, we talk with the co-editors of the new edition of "Nebraska Government and Politics," a book that provides background and context to the origins of Nebraska's political culture and institutions. Robert Blair is a professor emeritus at the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Christian Janousek is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Creighton University, and Jerome Deichert is director emeritus for the Center for Public Affairs Research at UNO.