Events

Black & White Night 2019

Saturday, October 5, 2019

Discover Golden’s history with your taste buds. Join us for a fun-filled evening of mingling, sampling and socializing all for a great cause—benefitting Golden History Museum & Park’s Free Admission Campaign.

5 to 6 pm • Golden Distiller’s VIP Experience
6 to 9 pm • Black & White Night
$50 Individual • $90 Pair • +$30 per person VIP

(includes dinner, dessert, drinks, and drawing)

Advance registration is required; tickets will NOT be available at the door.

Deadline is September 30, 2019.

Black-and-white attire is encouraged.

Purchase tickets:

1. in-person
2. by calling 303-278-3557
3. by sending a check
4. at eventbrite (online fee will apply).

Menu

Cornish Miner’s Pasty Dinner by Pasty Republic

Choose from: Foreman (cheese & potato), Caretaker (chicken & vegetable), or Miners (steak & potato).

Golden-inspired Desserts by The Dessert Stand

Spudnut Potato Flour Mini Donuts
Malted Milk Panna Cotta & Raspberry Gelee
Tiramisu & Malted Milk Cream
Cherry, Apple, and Peach Hand Pies
Jolly Rancher Stained Glass Sugar Cookies
Cake Pops Rolled in Crushed Jolly Ranchers

Select beverages by Golden Moon Distillery, Holidaily Brewing Company, and Miners Saloon.

Golden Distiller’s VIP Experience

Enjoy an exclusive experience learning the fascinating history of distilling in Golden and Colorado. Sample specialty spirits from Golden Moon Distillery. Space is limited for this exclusive affair.

Additional $30 per person.

Questions?

Call 303-278-3557.

Wild Things in Ancient Places: The Archaeology of the National Wildlife Refuges

Somewhere beneath the tracks of the bison, the nests of the piping plover, and the burrows of the black-footed ferret are the tools and fires of earlier peoples. These animals and their habitats are protected on our National Wildlife Refuges – a system of public lands that also offers a rare opportunity to preserve archaeological sites and historic places (and the occasional dinosaur). The eight states that comprise the Mountain – Prairie Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge system extend from the Canadian border to the desert southwest. The cultural resources of the region span 12,000 years from Paleoindian camp sites to Depression-era fire towers. The paleontological remains, archaeological sites, and historic structures found on the Refuges are diverse and wonderful and provide some unique challenges.

Presented by Meg Van Ness, Regional Historic Preservation Officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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.

More than a Headstone: The Lives and Legacies of Veterans buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery

DENVER, CO – MAY 27: A U.S flag is placed at every burial site in Fort Logan National Cemetery in recognition of Memorial Day on May 27, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. Fort Logan National Cemetery has 214 acres and has over 122,000 interments as of 2014. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)

The Veterans Legacy Program (VLP) is part of the National Cemetery Administration’s educational outreach initiative. Partnering with universities, VLP seeks to memorialize our nation’s Veterans through sharing their stories of service and sacrifice. Come hear the stories behind a few of our local heroes resting at Fort Logan Cemetery. Presented by Professors Carol Helstosky and Elizabeth Escobedo, along with a few of their amazing University of Denver students. 

Elizabeth Escobedo is an associate professor of Latina/o history, with a specialization in 20th century Mexican American history. She enjoys teaching a wide-range of topics in U.S. history, including modern America, the Latina/o and Chicana/o experience, women and gender, and the history of race and ethnicity in America. Her book, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front, was published in 2013 with the University of North Carolina Press. She has also appeared in two PBS documentaries, “Zoot Suit Riots” and “Latino Americans.” Her current book project is a comparative history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican women in the World War II U.S. military. 

Carol Helstosky is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Denver. She is the author of Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy (2004); Food Culture in the Mediterranean (2009) and Pizza: A Global History (2008) and editor of The Routledge History of Food (2014).

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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 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

Golden History Museum

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.

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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.

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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.

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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 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

Golden History Museum

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).

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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. Find out:

• Who was an American folk hero
• Who organized a “little piece of heaven”
• Who was a Colorado frontier physician
• Whose activism helped develop labor relations
• Who was an eccentric legend in San Francisco

In first-person living history, these 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

Golden History Museum

5:30 p.m. – 6:30 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.

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.

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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. 

Location and Pricing

Golden History Museum

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.