A few years ago, my esteemed colleague Ellen Terrell wrote an excellent blog post at Inside Adams, examining from a business perspective the firm of Scrooge and Marley, the fictional business at the center of Charles Dickens’s classic work of Christmas literature, A Christmas Carol. I thought I would see what an ethnographic perspective could …
Read the text and see the photos of the American Folklife Center's holiday play! It's 1814 and the U.S. Capitol has been burned by the British. President James Madison throws Library of Congress collections in a sleigh and seeks help from Father Christmas and the preservation specialists at the North Pole Library! The latest version of our play, which tours the halls of the Library of Congress. Each year, dressed in costumes that range from striking to silly, we sing, act, rhyme, and dance for other Library staff members and for members of the public. Our performances are based on the ancient tradition of mumming, which has come down to our archive in the form of play scripts, songs, photos, and other items collected in the early twentieth century.
It’s almost Halloween, and therefore time for spooky stories here at Folklife Today! Witches are, of course, a big part of American Halloween, and the witch is one of the most popular characters featured in costumes and decorations. These range from the standard image of a woman with a pointy hat and a broom, to …
This is a joint blog post written with Michelle Stefano. Episode Twelve of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! This is a special episode for us, in that it also marks the end of the …
The following is a guest post by Todd Harvey and Melanie Zeck of the American Folklife Center Muddy Waters – 29. (Head of the house) Farms 16 acres. Been knowing Son House since ’29. Learned how to play with bottle neck from him by watching him for about a year – followed after where he …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with Harmonia, a band from Cleveland, Ohio, which presents both rural and urban folk music of Eastern Europe, ranging from the Danube to the …
This is the first of a series of blog posts celebrating Didelphis virginiana, commonly known as the North American opossum. (Find the whole series here!) This cat-sized nocturnal animal is the only new world marsupial that lives north of Mexico, and therefore the only marsupial native to the United States. In most American dialects of …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. Find the whole series here! We’re continuing the series with John Cohen and the Down Hill Strugglers performing Treasures From the Archive Roadshow. John Cohen is a founding member of the New …
Episode eight of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In this episode. John Fenn and I discuss the work of Agnes Vanderburg, a Salish elder from Montana who began an outdoor school …
