The following is a guest blog post by Owen Rogers, a Liaison Specialist for the Veterans History Project (VHP). In Memoriam: The Honorable John S. McCain III We mourn the loss of the Honorable John S. McCain III, whose service in U.S. military and Congress yielded particularly meaningful contributions to the Library of Congress. As …
On August 30th, 1979, a group of hardy adventurers left Dewey Hart Ranch in the Larb Hills, Phillips County, Montana, in covered wagons and other horse-drawn vehicles to meet the Milk River and travel along it to Malta. The goal was to experience the wagon train as Montana pioneers once did, and to arrive in …
Here at the American Folklife Center, we’ve always had an appreciation for radio. As the home of an archive with a lot of fantastic audio recordings, the “folk archive” has been ripe for use on the radio since its earliest days. John and Alan Lomax, heads of the archive back in the 1930s and 1940s, …
This is a guest blog post by Julia Kim, Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center. Do you have precious VHS tapes of special family events that you want preserved in the digital age? Are you perplexed about what it takes to digitize your organization’s recordings? If so, you are invited to Memory XFR, …
The following is a blog post by Lisa Gomez and Sam Meier, Junior Fellows working for the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. To read their previous blog posts from this summer, go here and here. Lisa’s flashback to 2015: I have a vivid memory of listening to Ashton Carter, then-Secretary of Defense, announce that the …
Way back when Folklife Today celebrated our 100th post, I highlighted one of Alan Lomax’s collecting triumphs, the disc numbered AFS 100. For this, our 500th post, I thought I’d do a similar story about AFS 500. This disc was also recorded by Alan Lomax, during a field trip to the Bahamas in 1935 which …
When I was growing up going swimming near home usually meant going to a public pool, or possibly a nearby man-made lake. But when we visited relatives in the summer swimming more often was at the beach, at a lake, or at a quiet section of a river. I liked swimming in natural waters, but …
The following is a guest post by Sam Meier, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. For decades, women’s military careers have been constrained by the assumption that they are less physically capable than men. Even today, those who oppose complete gender integration often assert that gender-based …
The following is a guest post by Lisa Gomez, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. This summer, while serving as an LC Junior Fellow, I’ve had the honor and opportunity to explore the fascinating collections of photographs and oral histories archived by the Veterans History Project. …