The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that another outstanding oral history collection has just been added to the hundreds of interviews with contemporary American workers already available online as part of the Occupational Folklife Project. This one could not be more timely! It features interviews with 25 contemporary rural mail carriers and clerks (formerly known as postmasters) whose work contributes so much to the holiday season. In this blog, staff folklorist Nancy Groce talks with folklorist Emily Hilliard, the project’s director, about her fieldwork and experiences researching Rural Free Delivery: Mail Carriers in Central Appalachia, which was made possible by a 2021 Archie Green Fellowship.
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/.
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress welcomes a new Congressional appointee to the Center’s Board of Trustees: Heather Obernolte, Ph.D. Appointed to the Board by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, she will serve a term that expires June 1, 2028. With a long history as a volunteer and community activism, she …
This guest post is from Doug Peach, a Folklife Specialist here at the Library of Congress. In it he describes materials that the Center has drawn on recently for two collection displays focused on sports and community. Introduction The American Folklife Center is, perhaps, best known for its collections of music and storytelling—and for good …
This guest post by Joe Z. Johnson, one of the American Folklife Center's 2023 Folklife Interns, announces a new research guide focused on African American banjo players by sharing the motivation behind the guide and highlighting some of the content.
Over the past several months we’ve become quite familiar with on-boarding new people here at the Center, as a steady flow of incoming staff and interns have arrived since April. It’s an exciting time for us, and we wanted to share a bit of information about the five wonderful team members who have joined us. …
In October 2022, the American Folklife Center began a 4-month project performing mold remediation on paper and photographic materials for several collections. In order to reduce the burden on Conservation Division staff and increase AFC's ability to process collections more efficiently, the Center's archivists and technicians received training on how to treat mold so that those collections can be safely preserved and made available for research. By having AFC-trained staff do this work ourselves, collections can be made ready for researchers much sooner. This blog post presents the reflections of Serena Chiu and Carolina Restrepo on their training and work in mold remediation.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is kicking off 2023 with the much-awaited fourth season of “America Works,” a podcast series celebrating the diversity, resilience and creativity of American workers in the face of economic uncertainty. The new season, launched today, features captivating job-related stories from a range of occupational groups, including a professional wrestler, a cement plant work, a neonatologist and a grocery store cashier. The first episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and at loc.gov/podcasts. Subsequent episodes will be released every week on Thursdays through April 27, 2023. All the links you need are in this post!
Every so often I dive into our online collections in search of interesting fieldwork materials to share, especially anything from the large-scale field surveys that the Center facilitated from the late 1970s on through the mid- 1990s (visit an interactive Story Map about these projects). Just the other day I visited the Pinelands Folklife Project collection, used the faceted search options to pull together all audio files also tagged as “songs” and started listening. One particular 32-minute field recording caught my ear, so I’ve shared it in full in this blog.
