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Posted by: Stephen Winick
Did you know that AFC has a trifold brochure, which we give out at events and in our reading room? We thought we’d share it on the blog in time for the National Book Festival. If you come on down to the festival, you can take a few of these away with you! You can stop …
Posted in: AFC Publications
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
The following is a guest post by Justina Moloney, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow who worked with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. Correspondence, be it analog or email, is a running theme within the collections of the Veterans History Project. Of the nine World War I collections I worked with this summer, …
Posted in: Home, Narratives, Oral History, Storytelling, Uncategorized, Veterans History Project, World War I
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Introduction The great American songster Lead Belly, first recorded by John A. and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1933, is a towering figure in global popular music. In some cases, his influence can be clouded, or hard to understand, because of his own enigmatic personality and because of the fragmentary nature of …
Posted in: AFC History, African American History, African Americans, Folk Music, Folksong
Posted by: John Fenn
Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita is the current scholar in the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection, and has been using her time at the Library of Congress to explore materials held at the AFC related to Lomax’s 1952–53 field recording trip to Spain. In this recent guest post on the Kluge …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Folk Music
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
According to Hindu mythology, there is an unseen “planet” out there in the form of the head of a serpent god, Rahu Ketu. This god wanted to gobble up the sun. To prevent this Vishnu cut off his head. The head, Rahu, and the body, Ketu, became two entities out there circling the Earth (in …
Posted in: Animals, Beliefs, Hispanic American History, Myths, Native American History
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
The following is a guest post by Victoria Anderson, a summer intern in Sen. John Boozman’s (AR) Little Rock office. History may seem like a row of dusty old books sitting on a shelf, something people pass over because it looks boring, but I want to remind everyone that it is not. History is living …
Posted in: Iraq War, Korean War, Narratives, Oral History, Photographs, Storytelling, Students, U.S. Congress, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War, World War II
Posted by: John Fenn
This blog post about the filmmaker Nicholas Ray is part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. Nicholas Ray (1911-1979)—iconoclastic filmmaker, writer, friend to trouble, and…folklorist? To those who know the name, Nicholas Ray is most readily recognized as the director who brought …
Posted in: AFC History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by Wendi Maloney of the Library’s Office of Communications. It is an excerpt of this longer post, which originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog. Music scholar Nancy Yunhwa Rao will discuss her research and her new book at the Library of Congress at noon on August 9 …
Posted in: AFC Awards, AFC Events