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Posted by: Megan Harris
The following is a guest post by Patricia Glaser, a Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. They told us to be careful with our equipment and our clothing when we went to bed that night– be sure to fasten the mosquito netting. Not only to keep out the mosquitos but …
Posted in: African American History, African Americans, Veterans History Project, World War II
Posted by: Megan Harris
Kimberly Windham and Patricia Glaser are Junior Fellows working for the Veterans History Project this summer. This guest blog post, written by Kim and based on research done by both Fellows, describes their experience exploring VHP collections. As Junior Fellows, our mandate was to discover and elevate the voices of African Americans in the Veterans History …
Posted in: African American History, African Americans, Korean War, Oral History, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Lisa Taylor
It’s Valentine’s Day. It seems everyone has love on their minds today—at least half of us, anyway. Last year, the National Retail Federation predicted that 54.7% of the United States adult population was planning to celebrate the holiday with their significant others, friends or pets to the tune of nearly $20 billion. Yes, billion with …
Posted in: Afghan War, African American History, African Americans, Disablity, Hispanic American History, Iraq War, Korean War, Narratives, Native American History, Oral History, Persian Gulf War, Photographs, Storytelling, Veterans History Project, Vietnam War, World War I, World War II
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
For some time I have been intrigued by the beautiful voices of four young men, singers in the Holloway High School Quartet, recorded by John W. Work III in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1941. To mark African American Heritage Month this year, I thought I would try to find out a little more about them. I have …
Posted in: African American History, African Americans
Posted by: Stephen Winick
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 the The Fairfield Four, an African-American gospel quartet that has existed for more than 95 years. Best known for its performance in the …
Posted in: African American History, Homegrown Plus
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Langston Hughes is mostly remembered selectively as a “folk” and jazz poet, or author of black vernacular blues and jazz poetry. While Hughes did dedicate himself to creating and reinterpreting these genres throughout his life and career, the core of his work is actually in collecting and experimenting with folklore across spaces and media. In Harlem and abroad, Hughes operated as what scholar Daphne Lamothe calls a “native ethnographer,” adapting his work during and beyond the Harlem Renaissance across genres to the discourses of anthropology, folklore, and sociology in a mode reminiscent of that of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, civil rights activist, songwriter, and author of the local history book Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson, choreographer Katharine Dunham, and many others. Specifically, Hughes was an ethnographer of black vernacular culture, transcribing different kinds of linguistic and musical performance and reinterpreting those transcriptions in and as his own texts.
Posted in: African American History, Hidden Folklorists
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Way back when Folklife Today celebrated our 100th post, I highlighted one of Alan Lomax’s collecting triumphs, the disc numbered AFS 100. For this, our 500th post, I thought I’d do a similar story about AFS 500. This disc was also recorded by Alan Lomax, during a field trip to the Bahamas in 1935 which …
Posted in: African American History, Folk Music
Posted by: Megan Harris
The following is a guest post by Lisa Gomez, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. This summer, while serving as an LC Junior Fellow, I’ve had the honor and opportunity to explore the fascinating collections of photographs and oral histories archived by the Veterans History Project. …
Posted in: African American History, Oral History, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Megan Harris
Maybe you saw their photo on our homepage recently. Arms akimbo, the two men look at the camera straight on, wearing matching aviator sunglasses and khaki uniforms and with twin grins on their faces. A tent peeks out from behind them. Who are they? These two newcomers to our website were captured on film a …
Posted in: African American History, Veterans History Project, World War II