Colorado’s history is rife with imagery of rugged bravado: Zebulon Pike’s daring mountaineering expedition, the fortunes won and lost during the Gold Rush, the cowboy herding cattle across the plains. But — perhaps because of Hollywood’s influence — almost all the Western heroes are white. M. Dores Cruz, an assistant professor of anthropology at DU, wants to help people understand that people of different backgrounds and origins were part of the history of the West.

As the Peace Corps celebrates its 50th anniversary, much has changed in the world. And much has not.

By day, Jason Barton works for recycOil, a Boulder-based company that collects and recycles used fryer oil for biodiesel production. And in his so-called spare time, Barton is launching Denver Yard Harvest, a nonprofit organization that collects excess fruit from homeowners’ trees — with their permission — and donates the bounty to people in need.

If you were a kid in the late 1800s and early 1900s, you lived in a heady time: Coca-Cola, cotton candy, Life Savers and Popsicles all were invented during that era. But adults, arguably, had it even better. Until Prohibition, “Americans were the best cocktail makers in the world. People from all over the world came to America to learn how to make cocktails,” says Max Goldberg (BSBA ’05), who co-owns the Patterson House — a pre-Prohibition-style cocktail bar in Nashville — with his brother Benjamin.

Fair or not, we tend to think of hockey players in blustery, macho terms rather than in images of precision and grace. So it might be surprising to learn that Dustin “Dusty” Jackson — a 6-foot-3-inch, 205-pound forward for the University of Denver Pioneers — spent last spring working out with a figure skating coach after breaking his right leg in a preseason scrimmage.

War has many victims. But one group of people affected by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t fend for themselves, and Elizabeth McCarthy is determined to do something about it.