Happy Blogiversary! As our longtime readers may recall, the first post on Folklife Today was posted five years ago today for Halloween 2013. That means we’ve been around for five whole years! All of us at Folklife Today would like to thank all the readers out there who have read our posts over the years.
We’d also like to wish you a happy Halloween one more time. That first post five years ago called attention to Jack Santino’s Halloween article, and updated it with new information and scary collection items. Since then, we have collected Halloween photos, blogged about spooky stories, promoted a Halloween exhibit, featured scary songs, and shared other Halloween treats. See all of our Halloween posts here!
We also want to call attention to three new Halloween resources and one upcoming Halloween event. The first resource is our podcast, Folklife Today. The first episode is called “Haunting Tunes for Halloween.” It’s hosted by John Fenn and me, and it shares some great songs and tunes with comments and recollections by the two of us, along with Nancy Groce, Carl Fleischhauer, Jennifer Cutting, Nicole Saylor, and Gerret and Jeff Warner. It also includes a clip from Jack Santino’s classic 1982 lecture on Halloween. Find the podcast at this link, and use the “listen to podcast” link to hear it. Find its home on iTunes at this link.
The second resource is the Library’s new Research Guide to Halloween, which collects many of our most popular spooky resources in one place.
The third is yesterday’s blog post, which includes the audio of Jack Santino’s 1982 lecture on Halloween. That’s destined to be a beloved Halloween resource for years to come!
Finally, the event is “Frankenreads,” a multi-person all-day public read-athon of Mary Shelley’s classic sci-fi/horror novel Frankenstein, which was published 200 years ago in 1818. The reading will take place all day on Halloween, in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. It will also be live-streamed on the Library’s YouTube channel. They even created the nifty graphic, below. I’ll be reading myself, at about 6:30 pm on Halloween! Find all the information and a link to the stream here.
What if Halloween is not your cup of tea? Well, we have now blogged about folklife and oral history for exactly five years, and this is our 527th post. So we have covered all kinds of folklore, and presented rich oral histories with a special focus on the collections of the Veterans History Project. If you’ve joined us recently, please explore all our posts. We’re looking forward to the next five years!