New Mexico History Museum

The New Face of History

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 07, 2009

MEDIA CONTACT


New Mexico History Museum Takes Interactive Approach To Show The Many Sides Of Our Stories

Welcome to the first installment of our media-release series, “Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now.” See the links below for previous releases, along with information about obtaining photographs to accompany your coverage.

Some people say that “history is written by the winners.” The New Mexico History Museum (http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/), opening May 24, 2009, sets out to challenge that notion by taking a new approach, engaging visitors in the craft of history. Rather than staidly reporting what “happened,” the New Mexico History Museum presents a theatrical environment and the powerful stories of the many cultures that have called the Land of Enchantment home. Sometimes those cultures blended. Sometimes they clashed. Always, they added new stitches to a tapestry of life that’s among the oldest in the nation. Whether those stitches were for good or ill is up to visitors to decide. The museum allows them to reach their own conclusions about what “really” happened.

The New Mexico History Museum includes interactive multimedia displays, hands-on exhibits, and vivid stories of real New Mexicans. As a 96,000-square-foot extension of the Palace of the Governors – itself a story of New Mexico’s past and present in a 400-year-old building – the New Mexico History Museum anchors itself in the historic Santa Fe Plaza and offers a sampling of the people and the legends to be found throughout the state.

History museum curators know that individual accounts are often their most treasured artifacts. With stories from and about New Mexicans like Po’Pay, Juan de Oñate, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, Adolph Bandelier, Ernest Blumenschein, Robert Oppenheimer, and the ’60s-era counterculture, the New Mexico History Museum sweeps through centuries of human interaction.

Define your own place in history by understanding those who came before. Get into it!

For more information about the New Mexico History Museum, including a selection of user-ready high-resolution photographs, log onto http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm. More than 8,000 additional, high-resolution photographs illustrating the history of New Mexico are available by keyword search at www.palaceofthegovernors.org (click on “Photo Archives” then on “Digitized Collections”). Most requests for scans from this site can be delivered the same day, and usage is free for publicity purposes only.

Previous releases: New Mexico History Museum’s Core Exhibits: http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm/pdf/NMHMCoreExhibits.pdf

Telling the People’s Stories; A Message from the Director: http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm/pdf/TellingPeoplesStories.pdf

“Creating a Place for Our Past,” El Palacio: http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/media_files/files/PlacePast.pdf

For full release with graphics and images, click below on download PDF



Back to Press Release List »