Events
Golden History Museum & Park programs explore a variety of historic subjects presented by expert instructors. Learn about your community or neighborhood. Apply historic skills in a modern way. Create something with your hands. There is sure to be a program to suit your interests!
Remember: Registration is required for most programs, even when free. Program will be canceled if minimum attendance number is not reached 24 hours prior to start time. Help us provide even more programming by signing up and attending. [Click for registration instructions, or scroll to bottom.]
A Ragged Rabble of Opportunists
SS Central America
In the spring of 1857, the SS Central America was shipping a special load of gold from San Francisco to New York when it sank in a hurricane one hundred and sixty miles east of Cape Hatteras. News of the disaster reached the east coast and ignited the financial panic of 1857. In response, seven members of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association of Boston took advantage of the crisis to establish a frontier town in Colorado Territory.
Dennis Potter, retired Captain of the Jefferson County Colorado Sheriff’s Department, criminal justice professor, and previous presenter of the popular “Operation Hideout: The Investigation into the Kidnapping and Murder of Adolph Coors III” returns for this exciting program.
Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
Stroll through the History Museum on Candlelight Walk night and take a selfie in our “Epic Events” exhibit or listen to cheery holiday music. Visit the History Park and try a roasted chestnut. Explore the inside of the Pearce/Helps Cabin, warm up at the wood stove, watch live blacksmithing, and enjoy music and singing.
The History Park is home to many of the original buildings from the old Pearce Ranch in Golden Gate Canyon. Thomas and Henrietta Pearce raised eight children on their ranch. It was one of the largest in the area by 1912. Read more here.
These programs are free and there is no registration. Donations for park and museum programming are appreciated!
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
The Maps that Made America
Susan Schulten
Whether as handmaidens of diplomacy, instruments of social reform, or even advertisements, maps have been central to American history. Across five centuries, maps have captured what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such, they have the power to both illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past. Join us as Susan Schulten explores the myriad ways that maps have both reflected and shaped American history, narrating our past from the voyages of discovery to the digital age.
Susan Schulten has taught at the University of Denver since 1996, and from 2010 to 2017 served as chair of the history department. She is author of A History of America in 100 Maps (2018), Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (2012) and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (2001). She is also editor of Constructing the American Past, a two-volume history of America with Oxford University Press.
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
An Empire of the Mind: Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II
Dr. Greg Whitesides
The sciences played a critical role in American foreign policy after World War II. From atomic energy and satellites to the green revolution, scientific advances were central to American diplomacy in the early Cold War, as the United States leveraged its scientific and technical preeminence to secure alliances and markets. The growth of applied research in the 1970s, exemplified by the biotech industry, led the United States to promote global intellectual property rights. Priorities shifted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as attention turned to information technology and environmental sciences. Today, international relations take place within a scientific and technical framework, whether in the headlines on global warming and the war on terror or in the fine print of intellectual property rights. This lecture provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary geopolitics of science.
Dr. Greg Whitesides’ primary interests are the history of science, U.S. foreign policy and 20th century global history. His PhD studies emphasized the history of science, which involved archival research at the Human Genome Project, the National Institutes of Health and the National Archives (among others), and the eventual publication on the regulation of genetics and biomedicine.
After graduation, Dr. Whitesides worked for the University of Maryland and the Department of Defense in Japan and South Korea before being hired by the University of Colorado in 2004. Since then, he has taught over 20 different classes in the CU system.
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
Make Waves: Water in Contemporary Literature and Film
Paula Farca
Water is a symbol of life, wisdom, fertility, purity, and death. But a strain has been put on our water resources as increased energy demands combined with the effects of climate change to create a treacherous environment. In this program, hear author and Colorado School of Mines Professor Paula Farca discuss current water issues in the era of climate change using a wide variety of recent literature and film. At its core, this lecture demonstrates that water is an immense reservoir of artistic potential and an agent of historical and cultural exchange.
Paula Farca received her PhD and a second MA from Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on two main areas- contemporary, indigenous, and women’s literature and literature on energy and the environment. Along with numerous articles and book chapters, Paula has published Identity in Place: Contemporary Indigenous Fiction by Women Writers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (2011) and coauthored A Student’s Guide to Nature and Human Values (2010 and 2013). Paula also edited two anthologies: Energy in Literature: Essays on Energy and Its Social and Environmental Implications in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary Texts (2015) and Speculations: An Anthology for Reading, Writing, and Research (2006). Since 2008, when she joined HASS, she has tried to introduce our future engineers to the joy and intellectual excitement of reading and critical thinking and inspire them to become competent writers.
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
photo: Scott Dressel-Martin
Join us at Golden History Museum for storytime. We’ll read books related to various themes found inside the museum.
No registration.
Free for all.
Attention kids of all ages! Join us at the Golden History Museum for our brand-new “Golden Past-port” series. Each event will take an in-depth look at a museum artifact. Attendees will try new skills, make some art, and take home your own version of the artifact. Earn a stamp for each event you attend and collect as many as you can!
- Golden Past-port Series: Mining
- Saturday, January 25 @ 10:30 am
- Golden History Museum
- Registration required
- Free for members; $5 + fee for non-members (per child)
- Think you have what it takes to be a miner? Learn about various mining techniques, see if you can extract chocolate chip “coal” out of cookies, and earn a stamp in your “past-port.”
Location and Pricing
Free for members; $5 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
A Golden Crusade: How Colorado Launched a CIA Propaganda Campaign and Helped Eisenhower Win the White House
Denver provided the launching pad for two historic developments in the 1950s. The city hosted the 1952 campaign headquarters of Dwight D. Eisenhower, paving the way for the first Republican to occupy the White House in two decades. Denver also provided the launching pad for the CIA’s Crusade for Freedom, a twenty-year advertising campaign to “sell” the Cold War by, remarkably enough, promoting the overthrow of foreign governments in Eastern Europe.
Both campaigns seemed unrelated. But newly declassified documents paint a much more complicated picture. Based on a decade of research, Kenneth Osgood takes you on a tour of the interlocking web that linked Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Centennial State. The campaigns reverberated in large and small communities across the country, including in Golden, Colorado.
Kenneth Osgood has published five books on U.S. political and diplomatic history, including the prize-winning Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Campaign at Home and Abroad. A professor of history at Colorado School of Mines, he has also held research and teaching posts at Harvard, Williams College, Ohio State, University College Dublin, U.C. San Diego, and Florida Atlantic University.
 “Truth Dollars” |  Crusade for Freedom |
Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
A Campers’ Republic: How Camping Became a National Ritual
Dr. Phoebe Young
At first glance, camping out seems like a simple proposition: a chance to get back to nature and get away from it all. A closer look at how this recreational habit got built into American culture and federal infrastructure reveals a more complex story of dying Sequoia trees, the Great Depression, and hopes for democracy.
Dr. Phoebe Young is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder where she teaches environmental and cultural history of the U.S. and the American West. She currently serves as the History Department’s Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies and holds a Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy. Her books include, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (2006) and Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics (2015, co-edited with Marguerite S. Shaffer). She is currently completing a new book project entitled, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (forthcoming, 2021).
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
Unconventional Women of the West
The Legendary Ladies, Inc.
In this presentation by The Legendary Ladies, Inc., you will meet fascinating women who made unique contributions to the American West.
In first-person living history, various characters will share their struggles and triumphs as they visited and lived in the West.
The Legendary Ladies, Inc., are celebrating 28 years of “Making History Come Alive.” From 12 shows per year in 2006, this volunteer, non-profit organization, The Legendary Ladies, now appear in 50 shows annually. They perform spirited stories in a unique format, remembering and honoring remarkable women who were often forgotten.
Location and Pricing
6 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
photo: Scott Dressel-Martin
Join us at Golden History Museum for storytime. We’ll read books related to various themes found inside the museum.
No registration.
Free for all.
Suing for Freedom: Slavery and the Law in Early America
Honor Sachs
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved people challenged their status in court. They devised legal strategies, studied law, and worked with lawyers to gain freedom in jurisdictions throughout the colonial era and early national republic. This presentation by Dr. Honor Sachs follows the story of one extended slave family in Virginia who initiated dozens of freedom suits over multiple generations between the American Revolution and the 1820s, claiming freedom by reason of Native American descent. Although this family worked with some of the nation’s most famous lawyers – including Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall – their story has remained largely unknown. This talk reveals hidden stories about slavery, law, and family in early America.
Honor Sachs is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (2015.) Her teaching covers early America broadly, with particular focus on the revolutionary and founding eras, histories of race and slavery, legal and constitutional history, and histories of family, genealogy, and memory.
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
Pikes Peak: On Common Ground
Mark James
On July 14, 1820 Edwin James performed the first documented climb to the summit of Pikes Peak. July 14, 2020 will mark the bicentennial year of Edwin’s achievement. Mark James is Edwin’s ancestor. The common ground in the title is based, not on ancestral provenance, but on hiking and standing on the summit of Pikes Peak exactly 200 years after Edwin. Mark has been photographing Pikes Peak and the surrounding area to create a timeless, unspoiled landscape likely encountered by Edwin James and the Major Stephen H. Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountain West. In this program you will relive the adventure of Edwin James and the Major Long Expedition through story and photographs.
Photographing in black and white, Mark uses a pinhole camera which produces a soft and ethereal image. The photographs avoid mere documentary. Rather, the photographs erase the fine details of the landscape while leaving behind form and light. Mark James has been a photographer for over 50 years. He has served as a photojournalist, documentarian, commercial photographer, gallery owner, curator, landscape photographer, and presently, an emerging historian. Since 1995, Mark’s landscape photography has been closely associated with the underlying ideas of photography as well as the history of American Western expansion. In 1995, Mark was awarded a residency at Rocky Mountain National Park and thus began his present field of study: black & white landscape photography using a pinhole camera – a study that has spanned twenty-four years. Mark exhibits almost exclusively in museums. Currently, an exhibit titled Remnants of the West: Edward Curtis and Mark James was curated by the Dubuque Museum of Art and is on tour. Twenty photographs from Mark James are paired with twenty photographs of the legendary photographer, Edwin Curtis.
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Location and Pricing
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Free for members; $10 plus online registration fee for non-members
Membership
Membership pays for itself with just a few programs for your family. Join us.
Facility Rental
Learn how a Golden Museum Rental offers unique experiences that range from rustic to ritzy.
Click the green ticket button in the upper left of each event to buy tickets online. 
Click “read more” in the lower right of each event for details. 
Read the fine print and policies below (updated 11-20-18).
Event and Program Ticketing Policies at Golden History Museum & Park
Please note: Tickets will only be available at the door if the program reaches its pre-registration minimum.
Weather: All events are rain or shine. Tickets will not be refunded for any inclement weather including but not limited to snow, wind, rain or extreme temperatures.
Cancellation: GHM&P reserves the right to cancel a program for any reason. A full refund will occur automatically and notification sent if GHM&P cancels a program for any reason.
Refunds: Participants will not receive a refund except in the event that GHM&P cancels the program.
Facilities: Restrooms are not available on-site at the Golden History Park or Golden Cemetery. If at the Golden History Park, participants may use public restrooms located on 12th Street. Please call ahead to ask about accessibility concerns and mobility recommendations.
Additional details: Please note the minimum age requirements of some of our programs. Excessive disruptive behavior and any safety risks may result in a participant being asked to leave a program at the instructor’s discretion. Pets are not permitted at programs; service animals are permitted.
To purchase tickets, cancel your registration, or learn more about our events and ticketing policy, please call the Golden History Museum front desk during business hours at 303-278-3557.