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Archive: December 2021 (9 Posts)

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Saint George and the Hacker: A Zoom Meeting Mummers Play

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The American Folklife Center's 2021 Mummers play is about a zoom meeting that gets invaded by a hacker who won't let the participants leave until he gets a bitcoin ransom. 2021 has felt like a zoom meeting that wouldn't end, so we hope our audience can relate! Find a video of the play and the complete annotated script in this blog!

The cover of the Veterans History Project's 2021 field kit

Home for the Holidays? Take the New VHP Field Kit With You!

Posted by: Lisa Taylor

The following is a guest blog post by Owen Rogers, a Veterans History Project (VHP) liaison specialist. The Veterans History Project heard your feedback and released a new how-to Field Kit that’s more user-friendly than ever. Whether you’re virtually visiting veterans,  or spending personal time with family members who served in the military, bring the …

A man and woman surrounded by six children, who are examining gifts being unpacked from a large hamper. The father holds a turkey by the feet.

Scrooge’s Prize Turkey: Victorian Christmas Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This post is part of an occasional series about ethnography and folklore in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  Find the whole series here! In our last look at the foodways of Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, we examined the joy the Cratchits take in their small but serviceable Christmas goose, as Scrooge and the Ghost …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Caught My Ear: Dance Tunes in the National Jukebox from Collections by Cecil Sharp

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

Many divisions of the Library of Congress have fascinating collections that are closely related to folklife and that complement collections in the American Folklife Center. The Recorded Sound Section is a part of the Library that works closely with the American Folklife Center in a variety of important ways. Among their holdings are recordings related …

Eight people sit around a table. At one end, a woman carves a goose.

Cooking the Cratchits’ Goose: Urban Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol reveals an interesting fact about Victorian London: many working class people lacked cooking facilities, with only a hearth fire in their homes. In this post, we'll see some of their strategies for cooking a meal by looking at the Cratchits, the only working class family depicted in the book in a detailed way. We'll also look beyond the Cratchits to other London families in the same boat, and show how Dickens expresses social and political ideas about foodways through Scrooge and his interactions.

Illustration of a man in a chair by a fireplace interacting with a standing ghost

What Scrooge Ate on Christmas Eve: Folk Belief, Folk Medicine, and Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

In this post, we read segments of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol ethnographically, exploring the aspects of cultural context that stand out as different, surprising, and in need of explanation. In particular, this year we'll examine unusual aspects of Dickensian foodways. In this first post, we'll find out how to determine what Scrooge ate on Christmas Eve, and discuss supernatural belief and folk medicine along the way.