The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided a $208,808 grant to History Colorado as the museum prepares to debut the second season of its podcast, “Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains.”

“In such unprecedented times, people have a renewed hunger to understand how we got to now,” said Jason Hanson, the museum’s chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research. “There is no better place to start these narratives than History Colorado’s vast archive of stories. 

The forthcoming episodes, scheduled to debut on Sept. 16, will relate the experiences of “independent women,” countercultural idealists and Hispanic activists. The first episode of the season will be “A Line in the Sand,” which will examine Gov. Edwin C. “Big Ed” Johnson’s 1936 border closure with New Mexico during the Great Depression.

The NEH’s award to History Colorado was for the production of eight episodes between 45 and 60 minutes in length. The podcast’s first season premiered in the fall of 2019.

NEH also granted $400,000 to the Denver Art Museum for an exhibition on the indigenous Mexican woman La Malinche, who was a translator and cultural interpreter for Hernando Cortés during the 16th century. Kristine Stenzel, an adjoint professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado who now lives in Brazil, received $60,000 to analyze dialogue from the Kotiria and Wa’ikhana languages in the northwestern Amazonian region.