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Posted by: Stephen Winick
Every day this week at noon Eastern time, you can listen to, and sing along with, a respected musician performing a song from the American Folklife Center archive at the Library of Congress. That’s because this week, the American Folklife Center is working with the Daily Antidote of Song, a daily online concert and singalong …
Posted in: Archive Challenge
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
This post is part of a series of posts called Staff Finds During Difficult Times, in which staff members discuss collections and items that have been inspiring them while they are working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic or in other difficult circumstances. Find the whole series here! As I work from home and keep …
Posted in: Folklorists, Folksong, Games, Staff Finds During Difficult Times
Posted by: John Fenn
In this guest post, Allina Migoni (Reference Librarian, American Folklife Center) and Talia Guzmán-González (Reference Librarian, Hispanic Division) describe a new initiative honoring Hispanic Heritage Month 2020. This initiative is a collaboration between the American Folklife Center, Hispanic Division, and StoryCorps. Have you ever sat down with family or friends to look at old photos? …
Posted in: Fieldwork, Home, StoryCorps
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
The Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools in America Project was conducted in the summer of 1982 by the American Folklife Center to survey selected religious and secular ethnic community-based schools conducted, at least in part, in a language other than English to document the continued ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity of the United States. This collection …
Posted in: Fieldwork, Ukrainian Americans
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Attention college and university teachers and students! The American Folklife Center is planning to enhance and expand its outreach to higher education, making our resources more accessible than ever before to the college and university community. This is especially important as higher education adapts to increased demand for remote and online teaching brought about by …
Posted in: Higher Education
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
One frequent piece of advice for helping to keep our sense of well being as we need to stay home and stay safe during the pandemic is to find ways to be creative. Arts and crafts provide one way of doing this. I grew up with arts and crafts of all sorts as members of …
Posted in: Crafts, Ukrainian Americans
Posted by: John Fenn
This post is the third in series about remote fieldwork in our current environment, and part of the American Folklife Center’s efforts to facilitate conversations about cultural documentation practices (Read the first post here and the second one here). Unlike the previous two posts, this one is a conversation with a guest. Thomas Grant Richardson …
Posted in: Fieldwork
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with Cedric Watson, a four-time Grammy-nominated fiddler, singer, accordionist, and songwriter. Watson is one of the brightest contemporary talents to emerge in Cajun, Creole and …
Posted in: AFC Events, French American History, Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Jesse Hocking, who is part of a new cohort of archives staff across the Library who were hired to help bring collections out of the processing backlog. The American Folklife Center is excited to announce that the collection of Nancy Sweezy (1921-2010), noted folklorist, potter, …
Posted in: Armenian Americans, Asian American History, Folk Art, Folklorists, Massachusetts, Material Culture