Last year, the American Folklife Center brought our Archive Challenge model to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall…and you can watch it all at Folklife Today! Our good friends and colleagues across the Mall cooked up a great festival on the theme of “Youth and the Future of Culture.” As part of the festivities, we engaged groups of young musicians to learn pieces from the Archive of Folk Culture and play them on the festival’s main stage. Some of those sets were streamed in the Festival livestream. As a result, you can see and hear Persian classical music, Appalachian ballads, old-time fiddle tunes, Caribbean steel pan music, traditional Irish music, and Balkan dance music—the last two with special guest Christylez Bacon on human beatbox. Organizing these Archive Challenge sets was a highlight of our year last year, and we feel the result was a highlight of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as well. In this blog, we've embedded one of the videos and included a little information on the performers and their selections from the AFC Archive.
In this post, the American Folklife Center introduces its 2026 interns—Asha Isable, Diego Salinas, Kath Currey, and Susannah Keate—and highlights the projects they will support this summer.
In this blog post, Library Digital Specialist Steve Berkley takes a behind-the-scenes look at the processes for preparing the American Folklife Center's Community Collections Grant (CCG) project materials for publication as online collections on the Library of Congress website. As part of the Library's Of the People: Widening the Path initiative (2022-2024), the American Folklife Center CCG program supported twenty-nine project awardees from across the U.S. to document their community cultural traditions and activities, and preserve and make accessible resultant documentation on the Library website.
What can a historic department store reveal about veterans' experiences? Inspired by Washington's iconic Woodward & Lothrop building, this post explores unexpected connections between fashion, community life and stories preserved by the Veterans History Project. Through photographs and personal narratives, it shows how everyday places can open doors to hidden histories.
Today, June 18, Vietnam Marine Corps veteran Major James “Jim” Capers will receive the Medal of Honor. This spring, he sat down with his family at the Library of Congress to conduct an interview for the Veterans History Project. Learn more about what he shared in that interview!
As part of of the Library's celebration of fashion, the American Folklife Center looks at the intersections of fashion, culture, and traditional handcrafts as documented in several folklife collections.
On June 13th, the American Folklife Center joins June Family Day: 250 Years of American Fashion. We will be joined by The Legacy Collective, a group of local multi-disciplinary artists and members of the African American Craft Alliance, who will present a compelling display of African and African American textile and fashion traditions. This post presents some highlights from AFC’s past participation in Family Days events and provides a teaser for The Legacy Collective’s display and activity, during which audiences will be able to explore African American doll-making and to learn about — and experience — traditional and contemporary head wrapping.
On February 19, 1976, in what could be considered the first official action of the American Folklife Center, the Library of Congress hosted a reception to celebrate the passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act, which established the Center as part of the Library. The event featured speeches by Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin and by folklorist and lobbyist Archie Green, as well as remarks by folklorists and members of Congress. Most importantly, the celebration featured musical performances by Alonzo Elvis “Tony” Alderman (the last living member of the pioneering old time music group the Hill Billies), The Irish Tradition, Elizabeth Cotten, John Jackson, The Country Gentlemen, and Mariachi America. In this three-part blog post, we’ll present audio selections, photos, and other documentation of the event as part of our celebration of the Center’s 50th anniversary.
Research for an upcoming AFC foodways publication led to an exploration of the legacy of Japanese-American farming, from early immigrants to the West Coast, through internment during WWII, and continuing into contemporary farmers interviewed for an Occupational Folklife Project collection.
