Tack Hit: Contextualizing the Library’s Oldest Poster
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
An excerpt from AFC's collection of circus worker oral histories helps to contextualize the Library's oldest poster.
Posted in: clowns, Collection Highlight
Archive of all 1212 Posts
COVID Recollections: “Documenting COVID-19: A Panel Discussion on Community-Based Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Now Available Online
Posted by: Douglas D. Peach
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.
Posted in: African Americans, Archival Practice, COVID-19 American History Project, COVID-19 pandemic, ethnomusicologists, Fieldwork, Folklorists, Kentucky, Latino/a, Narratives, Native American History, New York, Ohio, Oral History, Photographs, Storytelling
COVID Recollections: “Walls Speak and People Need to Listen” – An Interview with Dr. Heather Shirey and Dr. Todd Lawrence about the COVID-19 Street Art Archive
Posted by: Douglas D. Peach
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.
Posted in: Archival Practice, COVID-19 American History Project, COVID-19 pandemic, Folk Art, Jokes and Humor, Material Culture
Caught My Ear: Ballads and Children’s Songs by Eunice Yeatts McAlexander
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The latest items to catch my ear in the Archive of Folk Culture are two reels of recordings of Eunice Yeatts McAlexander, a ballad singer who was recorded in 1978 as part of AFC's Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project. McAlexander, who passed away in 1990, had many wonderful versions of traditional ballads brought over to Appalachia from Britain, and she's a great source for unusual ballad texts. In addition to traditional ballads like “The Two Sisters,” “Little Massie Grove,” and “Lord Bateman,” she also sang nursery rhymes and lullabies for the collector, Wally Macnow. This blog post provides a little background on the singer and her songs, and embeds the digitized reels, photos, and detailed tape logs so you can listen and follow along.
Posted in: Folksong
COVID Recollections: New Collection of 25 COVID-19 Interviews with Childcare Workers in Appalachia, Now Available Online
Posted by: Douglas D. Peach
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.
Posted in: Appalachia, COVID-19 American History Project, COVID-19 pandemic, Fieldwork, Folklorists, Narratives, Oral History
Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine: Women of Aviation
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
The American Folklife Center shares the stories of female pilots and women who worked in the aviation field in honor of the 15th annual Women in Aviation Worldwide Week (March 3-9, 2025).
Posted in: Collection Highlight, Women's History
A Shantyman’s Farewell
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In this post, we hear one last farewell shanty from the retired sailor Patrick Tayluer, who sang and told stories for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1942. The song tells the romantic tale of a sailor weighing anchor to leave for the port city of Rio Grande, Brazil. He says goodbye to his sweetheart and asks her to marry him when he returns. This is the final post in a series about the sea shanty singer Patrick Tayluer, and contains links to the entire series where you can find more songs and stories of the sea.
Posted in: Folksong, Patrick Tayluer, Sea Shanties
Henry Alsberg: A New Deal Life
Posted by: Guha Shankar
Guest author Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is an academic librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York and dramatic writer and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the author of several publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal era’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1935-39. Her essay for Folklife Today on Henry Alsberg’s early career expands on her talk at the 2023 American Folklife Center symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022). The anthology and symposium offered a range of scholarly perspectives and retrospective analysis of the FWP on its 80th anniversary (see this blog post about the symposium); symposium webcasts are accessible here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi's post touches on Alsberg's pre-FWP activities as a writer, book editor and theatrical producer, all of which were concerned with advancing the struggle for social justice and human rights.
Posted in: African American History, American Guide series, Archival Practice, Federal Writers' Project, Henry Alsberg, House Un-American Activities Committee, John Edgar Tidwell, New Deal era, Sue DeMasi, symposium, The Great Depression
A Stitch in Time
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
Though primarily an audio-visual archive, the American Folklife Center is also home to several examples of traditional and folk crafts, such as a handmade notebook of sewing examples, made by Elsie Reinhart sometime between 1890-1920 and donated to the Library in 1977.
Posted in: Textiles