The American Folklife Center Turns 50 Today

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) turns 50 today, January 2, 2026. To mark the occasion, the Center will sponsor public programs, special events, and other activities throughout the coming year, celebrating AFC’s role in the preservation and promotion of traditional culture. Events will include special editions of our Homegrown Concert series and Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture series; special symposia, including one dedicated to our COVID-19 Oral History Project; and a major exhibition of treasures from the Center’s collections, to launch in mid-September.

“A 50th anniversary is a major milestone in the life of any institution,” said AFC Director Nicole Saylor. “We plan not only to look back at our history, but just as importantly to look forward to the next 50 years of fulfilling our congressional mandate by documenting, preserving, and sharing traditional arts and cultural heritage.”

The American Folklife Center dates back to January 2, 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-201, The American Folklife Preservation Act, which had been passed in late 1975 by the 94th Congress. The Act, which was described as “An Act to provide for the establishment of an American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, and for other purposes,” created the Center and placed it here at the Library of Congress with a mandate to “preserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate” American folklife.

The Act in turn defined American folklife as:

The traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction.

The law made an elegant case for the importance of preserving folklife and presenting it to the public. We find the law inspiring, so here’s a link where you can or read it for yourself.

The American Folklife Center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established in 1928 in the Library’s Music Division. The Archive was moved to the American Folklife Center in 1978. It has grown enormously in the last 50 years, to become one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world. The archive includes about seven million sound recordings, manuscripts, photographs, moving images, ephemera, and other items, six million of which have been acquired in the 50 years since AFC’s founding.

All of us at the Center are excited to share programming and information about the Archive with you. This blog will make regular postings throughout the year highlighting the Center’s contributions and collections, noting upcoming events, and presenting videos of events once they happen. Please subscribe at this link to make sure you get the latest news!

Read more about the history of AFC and AFC’s operations at our website–and stay tuned for more on the blog!