Molly Brown and Western Biography: A Look at Life and Legend

FAIN: BH-50316-09

Molly Brown House Museum (Denver, CO 80203-2417)
Anne Robb Levinsky (Project Director: March 2009 to March 2011)

Two one-week workshops for eighty school teachers using the life and biography of Molly Brown to examine the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Molly Brown House Museum plans to conduct two week-long teacher training workshops to explore biography and its relationship to the larger narrative of the trans-Mississippi West in the 19th and early 20th century. Expressing myth or fiction, community identity, popular story telling or the historical narrative of a particular time and place, biography has numerous uses that make tangible important humanities themes. These themes include the use of biography in history, the application of biography as a tool to express regional identity, and the presentation of the past through popular culture outlets, such as literature, theater, opera and cinema.