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Posted by: Lisa Taylor
If you’ve ever driven in the city, then you are certainly familiar with the jarring sound of an ambulance on an emergency run. The loud wee-woo-wee-woo, in concert with rotating red lights, evoke a sense of urgency that causes you to instinctively check your mirrors and pull over—making way for the vehicle that just may …
Posted in: Veterans History Project
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This post looks at the origin of "Ring Around the Rosie" and its history. It asks whether there is any reason to believe the story that the rhyme is about the plague. And it introduces the idea of metafolklore, folklore about folklore.
Posted in: Folksong, Legends, Medieval Folklore, Metafolklore (Folklore about Folklore), Poetry
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
March 14 (3/14) is Pi Day and July 22 (22/7 in the European date style) is Pi Approximation Day. In mathematics a common shortened figure for pi is 3.14 while the most well-known “approximate pi” is 22 divided by 7 (3.1428571428571428). These two celebrations of the most famous irrational number on dates related to that …
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post from Lotus Norton-Wisla, an intern at the American Folklife Center working to improve access to materials in the Alan Lomax Collection related to choreometrics, which was Lomax’s methodology for studying dance performance style. These materials consist of more than 70 boxes of paper materials and more than 3,500 film elements. …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Archival Practice, Dance
Posted by: Kate Stewart
The following is a Q & A with one of our long-term researchers, Jeannette Estruth. KS: Hi Jeannette! Tell us a little about your background and why you came to the Library of Congress and the American Folklife Center. JE: Hi Kate, thanks so much for inviting me to take part in the American Folklife …
Posted in: AFC Reading Room Visitors, African American History, African Americans, Civil Rights, Civil Rights History Project, Freedom Struggle, Oral History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by Joshua Caffery, who was the John W. Kluge Center’s Alan Lomax Fellow until April 2014. Caffery is a scholar of vernacular traditions in Louisiana, as well as an archivist and a musician. He is the author of Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings, and the …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus, Folk Music, Folksong, French American History, John Lomax, Louisiana
Posted by: Stephen Winick
On behalf of all my colleagues at the American Folklife Center, I’m very sad to say that Judith McCulloh, a pivotal figure in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology, and a crucial friend of AFC and its staff, passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning, July 13. Judy was a truly remarkable folklorist …
Posted in: AFC History, ethnomusicologists, Folk Music, Folklorists
Posted by: Megan Harris
I don’t keep a diary, but I used to. When I was in graduate school, I kept a diary on my computer, a la Doogie Howser. I wrote in it nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, venting my frustrations with my thesis and my anxieties about the future, and composing cheesy pep talks …
Posted in: Veterans History Project
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post from John Vallier, Head, Distributed Media at the University of Washington Libraries. His post is based on a presentation he made at an American Folklife Center symposium held at the Library of Congress last fall. This past September I had the pleasure of participating in the American Folklife Center’s Cultural Heritage Archives …
Posted in: Archival Practice