The Kursk Regional Local History Museum, located in Kursk, was founded on May 6, 1903, at the initiative of Governor Nikolai Nikolaevich Gordeev. Initially, it was named "Historical-Archaeological and Crafts Museum in memory of Emperor Nicholas II's visit to Kursk in 1902."

The museum opened on January 31, 1905. By 1915, its collection numbered 10,000 exhibits and a library of 1,000 books. As of 2019, the museum's holdings, which include 39 collections, contained over 181,000 exhibits. Among them are collections of beads, porcelain, weapons, numismatics, paintings, Cyrillic books and manuscripts, antique furniture, artistic items made of metal, wood, and ceramics, as well as monuments of painting and sculpture, documents, and photographs. The museum also features items from peasant and urban life of the 19th and 20th centuries, examples of folk and decorative applied arts, including an extensive collection of Southern Russian folk costumes.

The museum is housed in a building that is a monument of 19th-century architecture and includes three main departments: the nature department, the pre-revolutionary history department, and the Soviet society history department. It actively collaborates with educational institutions in Kursk.