Calendar
A curious beginning
What started as a small curiosity turned into a big question: did the Colorado criminal justice system pathologize women in the early twentieth century? The Golden History Museum collection includes a jailhouse register from Jefferson County covering 1878 to 1929. While researching a famous lynching case in Golden, Colorado, involving two men, we noticed that most of the charges for women were for “insanity.” The project bloomed into a multi-institutional search for the women recorded in the register.
This talk is focused on methods of record retrieval alongside institutional barriers. The archivist at the Colorado State Hospital Museum in Pueblo welcomed us to research the asylum’s archived medical records and documents. On the other hand, Jefferson County’s archivist informed us that valuable Lunacy Commission records are still sealed to date, obscuring some of the instances of women who were institutionalized against their will repeatedly. This presentation will offer biographies of the women and will explain the obstacles and benefits of working across multiple institutions in Colorado for historical research.
This program will be presented by GHM&P staff member Bianca Barriskill.
Tickets
GHM&P is transitioning to a new ticketing program. In the meantime, please contact us directly to register.
Outdoor Gear
No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. Nowhere is this more true than in Colorado. Holubar, Gerry, and Frostline are among the outdoor companies that helped establish Colorado as a hub of innovation for the outdoor industry after World War II. Rachel S. Gross argues that the success of these outdoor gear pioneers was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.
Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the outdoor industry. She is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. environmental, business, and public history. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024).
Tickets
GHM&P is transitioning to a new ticketing program. In the meantime, please contact us directly to register.