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Posted by: Stephanie Hall
This is my last post for Folklife Today as I retire on December 31. I find myself thinking about how I got to this point. I began as a Fellow in a program for graduate students at the American Folklife Center in 1986. The American Folklife Center Internship Program is a similar program that continues …
Posted in: AFC History
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!
Posted in: christmas, Folk Drama, Holidays, Mumming, Uncategorized
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 …
Posted in: christmas, Home, Narratives, New Year's Day, Oral History, Storytelling, Veterans History Project, Volunteer
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 …
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
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 …
Posted in: Dance, Folk Music, Folklorists, Folksong
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.
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
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.
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
Posted by: Megan Harris
This is a guest blog post by Michael Chamberlain, whose family recently donated his father’s large WWII photograph collection to the Veterans History Project (VHP). As the executor for my father’s estate, I know how difficult it can be for families to consider handing over what is sometimes the only tangible legacy of a family …
Posted in: Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Kerry Ward
From atop one of the most sacred places in our country, a soldier walks his 21 steps, halts, turns to face our nation’s capital and pauses for 21 seconds. As we close out this chapter of the year, I can’t help but reflect with gratitude on a recent event that the Veterans History Project (VHP) …
Posted in: Myths, Narratives, Oral History, Storytelling, Veterans Day, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War, World War I