Registration open for Montana Historical Society Conference

Press release

State history enthusiasts are invited to gather Sept. 28-30 for the 50th annual Montana History Conference at the Delta Colonial Hotel in Helena — the same location they convened for the first time in 1974.

Then, as now, the conference endeavors to explore underrepresented facets of regional history and to recognize that the past is a continuum and its people, events, successes, and failures perpetually impact the present and future.

With this year’s “Building on the Past” theme, organizations will continue to bridge the past, present and future through lectures, panel and roundtable discussions, tours, and workshops on a wide array of fascinating topics.

Thursday workshops cover issues ranging from historic preservation and publishing to teacher training and schoolhouse preservation. The ever-popular Made in Montana Tour will feature visits to a historic ranch, the former Western Clay brickyard, historic lime kilns and more. The evening concludes with desserts and Indigenous short documentaries at the Myrna Loy Center theater.

Friday and Saturday conference sessions will feature a wide array of 20th-century topics such as women’s history, Indian Education for All, communism, conservation, Modernism, Chinese history, social services and renaming monuments.

Friday night’s banquet dinner will take attendees back in time for a deeper look into the history of the early West. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn’s lecture will discuss Indigenous warfare, hunting techniques, environmental conditions, horse-borne interactions, and Plains power dynamics through the story of a one-month period of Sacagawea’s life.

“Just as with the first conference in 1974, we hope this 50th gathering of professional and non-professional historians will encourage deeper study and interpretation of Montana’s past, while suggesting new directions for scholarships,” event organizer Christine Brown said. “We could not pull this off without fantastic support from the Montana Office of Public Instruction, the Charles Redd Center, The Foundation for Montana History, the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation and a host of others.”

Full conference information is available online at https://mhs.mt.gov/education/index3, including lodging and registration details. Contact Brown at [email protected] or 406/444-1687.