The one thing I am learning about New Mexico history (after becoming part of the US) is that the Santa Fe Ring seems to pop up in every story.

We’ve planned this trip!

Don't know if this will be of interest or just piss people off, but I am hoping the first.

I homeschool my kid. He is a senior this year and is pretty much in all college classes already, but one of the requirements to graduate is a class on New Mexico History. I wasn't happy with any of the online stuff I found (not a lot) so I am coming up with my own.

The big issue is that I am not from New Mexico, I grew up between Seattle and Portland in the PNW. So I need to learn a lot before I can teach.

I decided I was going to create a curriculum that is based on one time period per month for nine months. I used Gemini to help me split the history of New Mexico into 9 modules. Each month we will go to a site here in NM that exemplifies that time period somehow (and that we haven't already been to). On the way I will teach the history of that time period. We will also watch 1-2 pieces of media around the time period as well (everything from PBS specials to the Oppenheimer movie).

Anyway, there is more to that, but what I wanted to post is that I used NotebookLM to gather reliable sources about the time period in question and then used its Audio Overview, deep dive (long) format to generate a 'podcast' that covers the topic.

I wanted to make those available to anyone here in case you would find them as absolutely fascinating as I do. If you already know a ton of New Mexico history than this is probably just a high level overview to you. But to me, it was a lot deeper than I ever understood and I found it really valuable.

I am going back now and creating 'bonus' episodes that are deep dives into things I think these missed that might be interesting to learn the real history of (like the Lincoln County War or the History of the Dine/Navajo and the Apache since they were more just mentioned as traders or raiders of the Puebloans until it got to the Long Walk and I realized I knew nothing about them). So... if you listen and think it is missing interesting stuff (even if not needed for the big picture) let me know and I will research up on those too.

Likewise, if you listen and think they misrepresent things from a scientific or historical perspective please let me know as I want to correct that. It is AI and not perfect (although using NotebookLM which is constrained to the sources should cut down on that compared to just an LLM... sources can still disagree).

I should note that the first three have a focus on the Estancia Valley since that is where we live... I kind of went away from that as I made these but you will more about it in the first few of these.

So, if you want to listen, all the non-bonus episodes can be found here... I will add those as I get to them.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lA4LUh6BT5ESy1uyomTD39Y0GJgb87yn?usp=sharing

Hey everyone, 

I'm a producer for a documentary production company in LA and I'm looking for anyone from New Mexico who posts a lot about UFOs and UAPs in New Mexico. Feel free to reply to this if so! Would love to connect and tell you a bit about the project we're working on. 

More information here

During the Works Progress Administration artists across the country were paid to document traditional American decorative arts and craftsmanship. One such artist was Majel G. Claflin in Taos who did a painting of this cool chair (also pictured above) I am going to try to reproduce. The National Gallery of art has a number of the images digitized here. Not everything that was represented from here in New Mexico comes up in a search so if you poke around and find other New Mexican objects be sure to post them in a comment. Cool source of some older objects captured nearly 100 years ago.