The highlights also include a bevy of enthralling new exhibits and events. The month of May celebrates Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the History Colorado Center is commemorating it through a historic Denver Chinatown walking tour, our Rice and Resilience exhibit and a special Asian American Pacific Islander Wellness Day.

National Endowment for the Humanities Grants Assure Season Four of Lost Highways Podcast and Funding the Reimagining of our Fort Garland Museum and
Cultural Center Offerings
Grant One:  Extending History Colorado’s Podcast
A new $360,938 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is enabling History Colorado to renew its celebrated podcast Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains for its fourth season debuting in January 2023.  Season three began this past January and will conclude in late Spring. 

Also made possible by ongoing support of the Sturm Family Foundation, Lost Highways, delivers addictive in-depth history through highly produced episodes in an entertaining documentary style. Each episode inspires listener wonder while inviting them to draw connections between western history and current events. Episodes span diverse cultures, geographies, and time periods in the history of Colorado and the West. 

Season four will feature Edward R. Murrow award-winning public radio host/senior producer Noel Black, assistant producer Maria José Maddox, and History Colorado curators. The NEH funding will enable season four of Lost Highways to explore how notions of American identity have often been shaped by widely held mythologies of the West. Listeners will take in an examination of where these myths meet reality. 

“NEH has honored the ongoing excellence of Lost Highways and made this fascinating and immersive podcast experience possible through sizable grants since season two,” explained History Colorado Chief Creative Officer/Director of Interpretation & Research Jason Hanson. “Season four will continue to give listeners a deeper understanding of how the issues impacting their lives took shape by vibrantly tapping into and adding to History Colorado’s vast oral history and audio collection.” Episodes can be accessed via Spotify, Apple, or anywhere podcasts are found, and by visiting historycolorado.org/losthighways.

Grant Two:  Expanding the Scope of the Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center
A new $40,000 Historic Places Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will fund a revised “Interpretive Plan” to expand the historical scope of the offerings of the Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center (The Fort). The Fort is located in the San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado at 29477 Colorado Highway 159 in Fort Garland, Colorado.

The new plan will expand the focus of the Fort’s exhibits from focusing solely on the military history of the site to the broader and more inclusive stories of the Borderlands of southern Colorado. For instance, the Fort will not only highlight its location as a nineteenth-century United States Army post, but also as a place that was impacted by the Indigenous and Hispano communities who preceded its existence.

The new plan will enable the Fort to navigate the rich history of this Borderlands region and explore a myriad of humanities themes. These include: how the landscape and climate impacted culture; how the cultures of the region influenced traditions and resulted in different layers of identity; and, how being a Borderlands region shaped the political and social history of the area, including the way engagement, activism and community memory was integral to the resilience of these Borderlands peoples.

Asian American Pacific Islander Wellness Day: A Space for Generational Healing
History Colorado Center | May 7, 2022 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
This half-day gathering will celebrate joy, reclamation, resilience and activism, through heritage-based practices that address the spiritual, mental and somatic scars of this community. It will feature speakers, artists, performers, healers, practitioners and vendors. Find more info and get tickets here.

Colorado's Asian Food Culture: Rice & Resilience
History Colorado Center | April 16, 2022 - June 30, 2022
History Colorado, in collaboration with the Japanese Arts Network and Asian Pacific Islander (API) community, is pleased to share with you a visual art and storytelling exhibition that celebrates Colorado's Asian Food Culture. Artists and community members highlight the importance of food and food legacy as it continues to be passed down through generations.

Denver's Chinatown Walking Tour
May 14, 2022 from 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
The history of Denver’s Chinatown is largely untold and known by very few. Wewatta Row offers the only walking tour of Denver’s original Asian enclave through its trademark Wazee Row Tours. On this tour, participants will walk through the streets and visit the alleys of the original quarters while discussing the deep history of the early Asian pioneers of Denver. Starting from Union Station the tour will examine a one-of-a-kind panorama of the quarters constructed from photos taken by William Henry Jackson, followed by an explanation of the infamous 1880 Anti-Chinese riot at the location of the flashpoint and an intimate look at the central quarters themselves. The tour will end at the location of a former community center that displays original architectural features unique to Denver’s Chinatown. The tour is led by Dennis Martinez, a dedicated historian working to bring back Denver's Chinatown. Get tickets here.

Bold Women. Change History. Lecture Series Presents Dr. Bonnie Clark
History Colorado Center and on Zoom | May 18, 2022 from 7 p.m.-8 p.m.

As May is Archaeology and Preservation Month, History Colorado is exploring the ways that archaeobiography can help rediscover lost stories of women in the past. Join us as Dr. Bonnie Clark, an archaeologist, professor and author, shines a light into the complex world of Amache Ochinee Prowers, a Victorian-Era Cheyenne Woman whose story counters myths about the role of women in the creation of the West and illuminates the power of using multiple methods of storytelling to recenter marginalized groups in the historical record.The evening is presented in partnership with: Cathey McClain Finlon and Richard Finlon; Denver’s CBS 4; and, The Chambers Initiative. Get tickets here. 

New Exhibition: Queer Capitol Hill
History Colorado Center | May 20, 2022 - June 2023
For decades, Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood has been a center of queer life, love, and liberation. It’s been home to bars and bookstores, coffee shops and community centers, and many other places and spaces where LGBTQIA+ Coloradans gathered and organized.

History Colorado’s Queer Capitol Hill exhibit highlights seven places in this area of Denver where the city’s queer history happened from the 1950s through the 1970s – all places you can visit today and is told through the comic-style illustrations of artist historian B. Erin Cole. The exhibit is Cole’s sketchbook of the queer past that still lingers in Capitol Hill today. Cole is known for drawing comics about cities, landscapes, historic interpretation, mental health, and more. This exhibit is drawn from research Cole did for their dissertation on single-family zoning and neighborhood activism in post-World War II Denver. 

Cole explains the following regarding the exhibit:
“When I walk through my neighborhood, I see the traces of LGBTQIA+ history and people everywhere. Walking by houses and apartment buildings, I wonder who lived, loved, and socialized there in the past. I think about long-lost bars and community centers as I move along Colfax and Broadway. Archives tell us some stories, a few of which I’ve tried to capture in this historian’s sketchbook of an exhibit—but there are tons of silences and omissions in what we know or don’t know about queer Capitol Hill.” 

New Events and Programs
To learn more about History Colorado’s new events and programs visit our website. Explore historical places, events and people through lectures, guided tours and online or in-person classes. Upcoming events include: People Pride and Promise - the Story of the Dockum Sit-in; A Capitol Hill Architecture Walking Tour; A Lego Building Workshop; and, our Members-only Mother’s Day Brunch.

HISTORY COLORADO PRESS ROOM

About History Colorado
History Colorado is a division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education and a 501(c)3 non-profit that serves more than 75,000 students and 500,000 people in Colorado each year. It is a 142-year-old institution that operates Colorado’s oldest museum, ten additional museums and historic sites, a free public research center, the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, and the History Colorado State Historical Fund (SHF), which is the nation’s largest preservation program of its kind. More than 70% of SHF grants are allocated in rural areas of the state.

History Colorado’s mission is to create a better future for Colorado by inspiring wonder in our past. We serve as the state’s memory, preserving and sharing the places, stories, and material culture of Colorado through educational programs, historic preservation grants, collecting, outreach to Colorado communities, the History Colorado Center and Stephen H. Hart Research Center in Denver, and nine other museums and historic attractions statewide. History Colorado is one of only six Smithsonian Affiliates in Colorado. Visit HistoryColorado.org, or call 303-HISTORY, for more information.

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