History Colorado

History Colorado Creating a better future for Colorado by inspiring wonder in our past.
(1601)

Inspiring generations to find wonder and meaning in our past and engage in creating a better Colorado. Established in 1879, the Colorado Historical Society – now known as History Colorado -- offers the public access to cultural and heritage resources of Colorado, including statewide museums and special programs for individuals and families, collection stewardship of Colorado’s historic treasures,

educational resources for schools, students and teachers, services related to preservation, archaeology and history, and a research library. It is headquartered in the History Colorado Center in Denver’s Golden Triangle Museum District. If you are looking for more information about History Colorado, please visit www.historycolorado.org.

Uncover Colorado’s dark, bizarre, and unusual history... if you dare. 👁️🕯️Step into a cabinet of curiosities curated by ...
09/02/2026

Uncover Colorado’s dark, bizarre, and unusual history... if you dare. 👁️🕯️

Step into a cabinet of curiosities curated by History Colorado’s own morose moppet, Millicent the Haunted Doll, at Creeporado: An Evening of the Strange and Unusual!

📅 Friday, September 25, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
📍 History Colorado Center | Denver, CO

Learn more and get your tickets at: h-co.org/creep

Join us at the museum after-hours for a night where Colorado’s darkest artifacts and oddest tales come out of the shadows.

What’s waiting for you:
🖼️ Rare access to our strangest, most macabre artifacts
🍹 Creepy cocktails & live music
📸 Hybrid tintype portrait photography
🕵️‍♂️ A museum-wide scavenger hunt (first 750 to finish win an exclusive 2026 Creeporado cup!)
🎁 Mystery Sweepstakes Giveaway: Every attendee receives a mystery envelope at the door—prizes range from event stickers and enamel pins to gifts from our community partners!*

*No purchase necessary. Limited to one envelope per person. Sweepstakes envelopes will be handed out until 9:15pm.

Sponsored by Denver Westword

Summertime in the Pikes Peak region has inspired some truly pivotal moments in Colorado and US history. Naturalist Edwin...
08/31/2026

Summertime in the Pikes Peak region has inspired some truly pivotal moments in Colorado and US history. Naturalist Edwin James and two colleagues made the first recorded ascent of the famous mountain on July 14, 1820, part of Major Stephen Long’s expedition to the Rockies.

Seventy-three years later on July 22, 1893, Katharine Lee Bates visited Pikes Peak. Smitten by the terrain and full of love for the woman many historians consider her romantic companion and life partner, Bates jotted down the famous lines that have become the foundation for “America the Beautiful.”

State Historian’s Council member Dr. Jared Orsi takes a sensitive in-depth look at this remarkable woman and the changing society she inhabited in “The Many Loves of Katharine Lee Bates,” new from The Colorado Magazine.
Read More: https://h-co.org/katharine-lee-bates-story

-
Image 1: Katharine Lee Bates, photographed wearing a ceremonial scholarly robe in her office, later in life. Courtesy of Wellesley College Archives Image Gallery, wca_2016_10_26_009

Image 2: Pikes Peak Cog Engine No. 4 pushing a passenger car up a hill overlooking Shady Springs, on the way to the Pikes Peak summit. History Colorado, 2022.57.12921

Image 3: A picture postcard of Pikes Peak featuring the title and opening lines of Bates’s “America the Beautiful.” History Colorado, 2006.90.46

08/29/2026

Have you heard the story of Ralph Hulbert, aka Ralph the Hunter? He was a member of Colorado’s most famous military unit, the 10th Mountain Division, which was constituted over 80 years ago. The decorated unit famously trained for alpine warfare at Camp Hale near Leadville before shipping out to help Allied forces break through German defenses in the Italian Alps during World War II.

Their bravery and special training were the deciding factor in breaching the so-called Gothic Line, and in helping to liberate Italy from Axis forces. Learn more about this remarkable unit in this special artifact highlight by Sydney Mauck, Anschutz Military Collections Specialist.

Want to learn more? Visit Healy House Museum & Dexter Cabin and see the exhibition, Winter Warriors: The 10th Mountain Division in World War II, closing on September 24th! This exhibition explores the history of the US Army's first winter warfare division from its training at Camp Hale in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains through their crucial breakthrough against the N**i German Army in the mountains of Italy.

-
10th Mountain Division Resource Center

More than fifty years ago, a group of Hispana women dreamed of a radio station to make public broadcasting more accessib...
08/28/2026

More than fifty years ago, a group of Hispana women dreamed of a radio station to make public broadcasting more accessible to underrepresented groups and communities. After 10 years of planning, they aired the first broadcast in 1985, launching KRZA. The station became the first community public radio station and the first bilingual educational radio station in the San Luis Valley, offering programming in both Spanish and English. Today, KRZA continues to broadcast regionally on 88.7 FM.

The buildings and landscapes that frame our daily lives do more than stand in the background. They witness our experiences, anchor our communities, and shape the stories we pass down. Check out our exhibition, "Keeping Place: Colorado Heritage for All." Now on view at the History Colorado Center.

-
Image 1: Four of the five original board members in front of KRZA, January 14, 2001. History Colorado 2023.111.10.1.
Image 2: Interior of KRZA. 2025. Photo by Jesse Hope.
Image 3: KRZA staff outside of broadcast building. 2025. Photo by Jesse Hope.

Colorado Springs has long sold a seductive story: A Quaker Civil War general falls in love with Pikes Peak, builds a rai...
08/27/2026

Colorado Springs has long sold a seductive story: A Quaker Civil War general falls in love with Pikes Peak, builds a railroad, and creates a beautiful, healthy city where churches replace saloons and the Rocky Mountain air restores the soul. But the real story of Colorado’s second city is stranger—and tells a more interesting tale about how becoming a state depended as much on marketing as on gold rushes or coal booms.

In a new episode of Lost Highways, we peel back the myth of William Jackson Palmer and the founding of Colorado Springs. Palmer was an abolitionist, railroad visionary, land developer, idealist, and relentless capitalist. His dream depended on a clever—and sometimes ethically murky—combination of railroads, real estate, violence, foreign investors, aggressive marketing, and the creation of a city so his railroad would have somewhere to go. Join the Lost Highways team and uncover the deeper legacy of a place that, in some ways, may still be living inside the marketing scheme that created it.

🎧 Find it today on our website: https://h-co.org/selling-springs
Or wherever you download your favorite podcasts!

-
Image 1: William Jackson Palmer, studio portrait taken between 1880-1900. History Colorado, 89.451.2837
Image 2: Statue of William Jackson Palmer that still stands near the heart of Colorado Springs. Photo taken around 1920. History Colorado, 86.296.5207

August 26, is Women’s Equality Day, celebrating the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted most (but not a...
08/26/2026

August 26, is Women’s Equality Day, celebrating the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted most (but not all) women the right to vote when it was ratified in 1920. Since its inception in 1973, the annual event highlights the achievements women have made while acknowledging that there’s a long way to go to reach true equality for all.

Read more about who was included and excluded in the 19th Amendment from the Colorado Magazine at: https://h-co.org/what-does-equal-suffrage-mean
--
Image 1: Eliza Burton "Lyda" Conley (Wyandot), the first Native American woman lawyer in the US (1902) and first to argue a case before the US Supreme Court (1909). Wikimedia Commons
Image 2: Badge celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment with a vote cast for the Harding-Coolidge ticket. Wikimedia Commons

08/25/2026

First developed by a civilian nonprofit, purchased (and expanded) by the City of Pueblo in 1919, and revitalized through the 1930s by New Deal-era federal programs, Pueblo Mountain Park has been a favorite getaway for southern Coloradans for generations.

Sadly, this beautiful Beulah Valley spot has been devastated by the still-raging Aspen Acres Fire, which burned out much of the surrounding wilderness and destroyed many of the park's structures including the historic Horseshoe Lodge, built by the WPA in 1937 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 1994.

Only time will tell what the future holds for this iconic mountain park. Our hearts go out to all Coloradans whose lives (and cherished memories) have been changed forever by this year's wildfires—in Pueblo County and beyond.
--
Excerpts from a home movie by Japanese-born Pueblo photographer Frank Muramoto, showing a family trip to Pueblo Mountain Park in the late 1930s. During this trip, Muramoto filmed the historic Horseshoe Lodge, the long building with many doors, shortly after it was completed.

Pueblo City-County Library District, PCCLD-MSS-021_reel_01

⛺ Image titled: The Camp on St. Charles Creek; San Isabel Forest, July 13,1924. History Colorado 89.451.773
08/24/2026

⛺ Image titled: The Camp on St. Charles Creek; San Isabel Forest, July 13,1924. History Colorado 89.451.773

When Did Colorado Begin? The technically correct date—August 1, 1876—might be hiding more questions than answers. Long b...
08/22/2026

When Did Colorado Begin? The technically correct date—August 1, 1876—might be hiding more questions than answers. Long before Colorado became a state, the region was home to Indigenous nations, crossed by empires, shaped by trade, and defined by competing visions of what this place could become. Even the state’s borders were political inventions, imposed over older homelands, communities, and ways of life.

In this provocative new essay, State Historian’s Councilor Nick Saenz of Adams State University asks us to rethink Colorado’s origin story—and consider what happens to our view of who we are when we push its starting point centuries deeper into the past. The result is a more complicated, contested, and ultimately richer story of how Colorado became Colorado. All new from The Colorado Magazine.
Read More: https://h-co.org/straight-lines-broken-histories

-
Image 1: A group of Apache men posing with weapons, photographed in 1873. The Apache were one of many peoples who inhabited the land known as Colorado long before Euro-Americans began drawing borders across it. Photo by Lt. George M. Wheeler. History Colorado, 84.192.1591

Image 2: A group of surveyors posing with their equipment in 1878. Borders were often drawn up by politicians who had little access to information about the land they were dividing up, and only surveyed later by geologists and cartographers who charted details that inhabitants of the region already knew and shaped their lives around. History Colorado, 84.192.688

Image 3: Arapaho spiritual leader Little Raven (seated on the far left) and his family posing for a photograph with early Colorado trader William Bent (second from the left), in 1869 at Fort Dodge, Kansas. The men seated on the roof of the adobe building behind them are United States soldiers. Photo by William S. Soule. History Colorado, 89.451.3767

Image 4: A New Map of Texas, Oregon and California, showing the American West before Colorado was carved out from various other territories. History Colorado, H.976

Address

1200 Broadway
Denver, CO
80203

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 5pm
Tuesday 10am - 5pm
Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm
Sunday 10am - 5pm

Telephone

+13034478679

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when History Colorado posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category