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The University of Nebraska was created by an act of the Nebraska state legislature in 1869, two years after Nebraska reached statehood. The school was given a mission to "afford to the inhabitants of the state the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts." The school received an initial land grant of about 130,000 acres and the campus construction began with the building of University Hall in its first year. By 1873, the University of Nebraska had offered its first two degrees to its first graduating class. The school remained small and suffered from a lack of funds until about 20 years after its founding, when its high school programs were taken over by a new state education system. From 1890 to 1895 enrollment rose from 384 to about 1,500. A law school and a graduate school were also created at about this time period, making it the first school west of the Mississippi to establish a graduate school. By 1897, the school was 15th in the nation in total enrollment.
Through the turn of the 20th century, the school struggled to find an identity as both a pragmatic, frontier establishment and an academic, intellectual institution. It also developed a competitive spirit in the form of a debate team, a football team (first called the Cornhuskers in 1901), and the arrival of fraternities and sororities. In 1913–14, a fierce debate ensued over whether to keep the University in downtown Lincoln or to move it out of town. The issue was not resolved until a statewide referendum sided with the downtown plan. After purchasing property downtown, the school experienced a building boom, both on the new property and on the farming campus. The school would not experience another boom until the late 1940s, when the sudden arrival of thousands of soldiers returning from the war for an education forced the school to seek further expansion.
This list of University of Nebraska–Lincoln people includes notable graduates, instructors, and administrators affiliated with University of Nebraska–Lincoln.