Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains

Jul 02 2024 46 ep. 53 mins 380
Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains Podcast artwork

History Colorado’s critically acclaimed podcast, Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains, expands the history of the American West by exploring how overlooked stories from the past have shaped current world events and continue to impact our lives today. Each season, host Noel Black, producer and producers Maria Maddox and Dustin Hodge delve into stories from our shared past that we couldn't believe we'd never heard. Lost Highways is made possible by and a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by a founding grant from the Sturm Family Foundation.

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Slavery in the South(west)

Jul 02 2024 63 mins  
It’s often said that slavery is America’s original sin. But the kind of slavery most of us learn about in history class—the brutal, dehumanizing enslavement of Black people in the Southern states—wasn’t the only or even the first kind of bondage in the Americas. On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at a far-less institutionalized form of forced labor and servitude wi

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Columbus

Jun 27 2024 66 mins  
A monument to Christopher Columbus, sitting in the middle of Pueblo, Colorado has been dividing the town for years. To the large population of Italian-Americans whose ancestors came to Pueblo around the turn of the twentieth Century, it has long been a point of pride and a symbol of cultural belonging. But for the Indigenous and Chicano communities who also call Pueblo home, the st

Set in Stone

Jun 10 2024 44 mins  
Since the racial justice protests of 2020, when most people think of monuments being torn down, they think of confederate statues in the south being toppled from their pedestals. But a Civil War monument to Union soldiers that stood in front of the Colorado capital for more than a hundred years was also pushed over during the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s m

The Unfairer Sex

May 30 2024 65 mins  
On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll take a look back at how Title IX’s passage in 1972 inadvertently codified the separation of sports by sex. And while the law opened the door to equal opportunity in sports and education for women, it also placed sex at the center of how we define fairness without fully addressing issues of equality where gender and race are concerned. We'

Unforgetting Los Seis

Apr 30 2024 55 mins  
On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons—the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills. Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. Two days later, another car in downtown Boulder exploded, killing three more young activists. Their deat

Oral Histories of the Sand Creek Massacre from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Located in Oklahoma

Apr 17 2024 45 mins  
The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. On the morning of November 29, 1864, US troops under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people made up mostly of women, children, and elders along the Big Sandy Creek in Southeastern Colorado, near the present

American Gothic

Feb 21 2024 54 mins  
In 1881, white residents in the mining town of Gothic, Colorado lynched a Chinese man. Or did they? As the latest episode of Lost Highways investigates this reported act of anti-Chinese racial violence from Colorado’s past, we consider what it means to belong in the places we call home, and how such acts of violence continue to echo into the present—whether it actually happened

When History Burns

Feb 07 2024 63 mins  
With the new reality of megafires in the West, we take a look at what happens when history itself is destroyed and how we hold on to who and what we are when we lose the artifacts and records that tell our stories. We’ll take you from the Waldo Canyon Fire of 2012 near the town of Manitou Springs to the Denver suburbs of Louisville and Superior, Colorado where the 2021 Marshall F

From Sefarad to the San Luis Valley: Crypto-Judaism in the Southwest

Jan 24 2024 58 mins  
Colorado's San Luis Valley is the last place you might expect to find a centuries old lineage of Sephardic Jews. But a rare form of breast cancer and a host of odd traditions, artifacts, and rituals led researchers to discover an enclave of Crypto-Jews that fled Europe for the New World in the 16th Century to hide out in one of the most remote areas of the lower 48 states. On this

Mesa Verde of the Mysteries

Aug 02 2023 54 mins  
For nearly a century-and-a-half, archaeologists have been studying Mesa Verde in hopes of deciphering what happened to the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived and thrived there for so long. For many, it remains one of the great mysteries in the history of North America. On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll explore the way that historians and archaeologists try to solve these k