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Category: Languages and Dialects

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

C’est la guerre-That’s the War!

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

The following is a guest post by Justina Moloney, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. I own a special collection of letters my father sent to me during his deployment to Afghanistan six years ago, when I was in my second year of college. They were …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Native American Cultural Revitalization Today

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

I remember a history class my junior year in high school dealing with the period in United States history when Indian tribes were being forced onto reservations. Presented as a better option were Indian schools where children were taught to assimilate into American society. To ensure that they would learn English and American customs these …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Corsican Language and Expressive Culture

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

This guest blog post is by Alexandra Jaffe, who will be speaking on this topic at noon on December 2, 2014 in the Montpelier Room, 6th floor, James Madison Building, Library of Congress as part of the American Folklife Center’s Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. Jaffe is a professor of Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

The Animals Marched In Two By Two: More Songs About Noah’s Ark

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In my last post, I discussed the more serious side of songs about Noah’s ark. As I mentioned, though, there are other songs too, often with more celebratory messages–or even silly ones.  We’ll look at some of those Noah songs in this post. Celebratory songs tend to focus on the joy felt by Noah when …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Narratives of Women and Girls: the Center for Applied Linguistics Collection

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

For Women’s History Month, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some examples of interviews with women and girls in American English Dialects: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection. This online collection is one of several dialect collections in the American Folklife Center archive. With a little digging, such collections can yield exciting examples of …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Indigenous American Cylinder Recordings and the American Folklife Center

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

As November is Native American Heritage Month, it seems a good opportunity to talk about some of the services the American Folklife Center provides for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, and for those who wish to learn more about them. The archival collections of the Library of Congress include the largest body of …