December 7, 2014 will mark 73 years since the infamous attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Americans far and wide felt the collective trauma of the attack, which led to the United States’ entry into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it, “a date which will live in infamy.” He was …
This guest blog post is by Alexandra Jaffe, who spoke 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 with …
Every year around this time, young people get ready to head back to school. For college students, this means there are books to purchase, roommates to meet, outrageous debt to acquire and cafeteria food to hate. However, all the stress and uncertainty that comes with going back to school is nothing compared to what many …
In honor of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, we present this vintage AFC researcher photo. (And by “vintage,” I mean “prior to the existence of Folklife Today.”) This photo shows the stage, film, and television actor George Takei, best known as Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek, who visited the AFC Reading Room on April …
For National Poetry Month, I thought I’d tell a little story about a poem. This piece of verse was recited by a man named Fred Soule at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp in Visalia, California on September 2, 1941. The camp was one of several such migrant worker camps in California, established by the …