The following is a guest post by Irene Lule, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. In today’s highly visual world, a popular type of YouTube video is the “soldier coming home” video. These clips are fairly basic in their premise. Someone captures the moment a service …
A little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI (Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the …
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 …
This is a guest post by Todd Harvey, acquisitions coordinator and folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center. Fifteen years ago, a moving van carrying four tons of archival material documenting the National Storytelling Festival arrived at the Library of Congress in the largest single acquisition the American Folklife Center has yet undertaken. The National …
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Kelly Revak. I’ve recently joined the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as an archivist. One of my first tasks was to catalog Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Passamaquoddy recordings as a part of the Ancestral Voices project team. Made in 1890, these recordings are …
This blog post about the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. Billy Bragg will be here for a book talk, July 21 at 7:00 pm in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Memorial Building. …
Note: This is the third in a series of posts about the murder ballad “Batson.” This one discusses the version of the ballad performed by Wilson Jones, aka “Stavin’ Chain,” in light of the real-life Batson case. In previous blog posts about the murder ballad “Batson,” I looked at early versions collected by Robert Winslow …
In the first of the “Folklife at the International Level” series, I ended with a glimpse into the complex issues that arise when intellectual property (IP) protection is sought for “traditional cultural expressions,” or “TCEs,” the terminology used by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). On its website, WIPO describes such expressions as including “music, …
The following is a guest post by Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist and Director of the Occupational Folklife Project. After seven years of planning, research, fieldwork, and archiving, the American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that the first installment of its Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) launches today on the Library of Congress’s website with …
