On March 11, 2025, the American Folklife Center held a panel discussion with four cultural documentarians of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the COVID-19 American History Project. In this post, we feature the webcast of the panel discussion, alongside photos from the event.
In this COVID Recollections post, we continue to commemorate the 5th anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by highlighting the COVID-19 Street Art Archive—an online, archival collection of street art related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This post features an interview with Dr. Heather Shirey (Professor of Art History, University of St. Thomas) and Dr. Todd Lawrence (Associate Professor of English, University of St. Thomas), who created the COVID-19 Street Art archive. Shirey and Lawrence discuss their inspiration for the archive, their favorite items in the collection, and their thoughts on archiving art that is intended to be temporary. The COVID-19 Street Art Archive is just one of many collections available on the American Folklife Center's COVID-19 Research Guide. Find more at https://guides.loc.gov/covid-19-folklife.
In this post, the American Folklife Center announces the online publication of a new interview collection from the COVID-19 American History Project—It Takes a Village: Rural Central Appalachian Childcare Providers’ COVID-19 Experiences. The collection features 25 interviews with rural childcare workers in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, detailing their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
