Buffalo Bill's Great Plains lead off spring Olson seminars

            A talk on the early life and times of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody will lead off the spring semester series of the Paul A. Olson Seminars in Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

            Douglas Seefeldt, an assistant professor of history and a faculty fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL, will present "Buffalo Bill's Great Plains, 1846-1879," in a seminar at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 18 in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St.

            Seefeldt will share some of the findings from "Mapping Buffalo Bill's Great Plains," a digital history research project that examines and displays multiple perspectives on Great Plains history via the lens of Cody's early life and events surrounding him. Seefeldt said the project used key events from Cody's 1879 autobiography to show how his Great Plains experiences moved beyond the legendary and demonstrates the important role the region played in territorial expansion, the Indian Wars, environmental changes, American commercial and technological progress, and their related legacies.

            The spring seminars were chosen to complement the March 28-30 symposium, "1862-2012: The Making of the Great Plains," sponsored by the UNL Center for Great Plains Studies in collaboration with Homestead National Monument of America, National Park Service.

            Following is the schedule of other spring semester Olson seminars. All seminars begin at 3:30 p.m. in the Great Plains Art Museum, following a 3 p.m. reception. Sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies at UNL, they are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the center at 402-472-3082 or visit www.unl.edu/plains.

• Feb. 15 -- "The Great Sioux Uprising -- 1862," Hugh Reilly, associate professor, School of Communication, University of Nebraska at Omaha.
• March 14 -- "Nineteenth-Century Fort Peck Assiniboine Cultural Persistence," Dennis J. Smith, associate professor of history and Native American studies, UNO.
• April 11 -- "Reflections on the Morrill Act and the Man for whom It's Named," F. Edwin Harvey, director of the Justin Smith Morrill Scholars Program and professor of hydrologic sciences, UNL.

Writer: Linda Ratcliffe, Center for Great Plains Studies, 402-472-3965