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Posted by: Michelle Stefano
This post, which is the first in a two-part series, is co-authored with folklorist Robert Baron and provides a summary of the first roundtable of the American Folklife Center's Community-driven Archives online discussion event, held in September 2023 and now available online.
Posted in: AFC Events, Archival Practice, Intangible Cultural Heritage
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
The following is a guest blog post by Travis Bickford, head of programs and communications at The Library of Congress Veterans History Project (VHP). On August 28, 2005, it was 111 degrees in Baghdad. That kind of heat makes you conspiratorial, like “nah, this ain’t real” kind of heat. I’d only been in country a …
Posted in: African Americans, COVID-19 pandemic, Iraq War, Louisiana, Narratives, Oral History, Storytelling, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In this sixth post about the Green Man, a figure of British and European folklore, we suggest the figure, while it had roots in pagan belief and iconography, had by the Middle Ages become a Christian image. In this post we look at pagan antecedents, including the Roman god Silvanus and foliate heads found on Roman temples. We also carefully examine the 1939 statements of folklorist Lady Raglan concerning the Green Man's status as an old pagan image with a new meaning in its Christian context.
Posted in: Green Man
Posted by: Michelle Stefano
This post is an excerpt of an interview with Lola Quan Bautista, Associate Professor of Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, about her and her team's 2023 American Folklife Center Community Collections Grant project, Celebrating CHamoru Nobenas.
Posted in: AFC Awards, Fieldwork, Pacific Islands Americans, Religion
Posted by: Allina Migoni
This is a guest blog post by Drew Holley, a master's student in the Folklore Studies program at Utah State University with a particular interest in food and film. Drew completed his internship at the American Folklife Center earlier this year. Today’s blog will showcase foodways collections (traditions and practices surrounding food) found at the American Folklife Center.
Posted in: Animals, Foodways, Internship program
Posted by: Guha Shankar
In this guest blog, Dr. John Edgar Tidwell, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kansas, focuses on the critical importance of Sterling A. Brown's work as Editor on Negro Affairs for the Depression-era Federal Writers' Project, and his efforts in the struggle against racial inequality by "authenticat[ing] the representations of Blacks in the American Guide Series travel guides." The response to his work by authorities speaks volumes about the repressive political climate that sought to suppress any research and analysis of societal conflict and injustice such as Brown's. Dr. Tidwell presented a version of these remarks at an AFC symposium in June 2023 to mark the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022), which critically examines the FWP on its 80th anniversary. It is most appropriate to publish this blog today, since it was 45 years ago today, on November 16, 1978, that the Library of Congress celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Archive of Folk Song with a day-long symposium featuring, among others, Alan Lomax, song-collector and archivist for the Archive in its early years; David "Honeyboy" Edwards, master blues singer and later a Grammy recipient; and Sterling A. Brown, author, poet, and guiding figure in the FWP.
Posted in: AFC History, African American Heritage Month, African American History, Federal Writers Project, John Edgar Tidwell, Sterling A. Brown
Posted by: Michelle Stefano
This Folklife Today post is written by Dr. Sarah Fouts, UMBC, who shares the second film in the American Folklife Center Homegrown Foodways Film Series, available for viewing in this post and on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.
Posted in: AFC Events, Film, Foodways, Homegrown Foodways Premieres, Latino/a, Louisiana
Posted by: John Fenn
The following is a guest post by Meg Nicholas, Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center. In this post, Nicholas details her search for materials related to the Lenape people at the Library of Congress. Nicholas is the newest member of the AFC staff. Read more about her here: https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2023/06/new-faces-at-afc-staff-and-interns/.
Posted in: Native American History
Posted by: Megan Harris
This Veterans Day, the Veterans History Project (VHP) is proud to debut a pair of research tools to help users discover and navigate our collections related to the Vietnam War. The newest installment of Serving: Our Voices pulls from VHP’s holdings of over 25,0000 narratives relating to Vietnam veterans. For this presentation, we have focused …
Posted in: Oral History, Serving: Our Voices, Veterans Day, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War