This COVID Recollections entry details an upcoming American Folklife Center symposium and concert, both focused on COVID-19 and cultural heritage, which will take place at the Library of Congress on March 12 and 13, 2026. These events are free and open to the public, but the concert requires pre-registration. The American Folklife Center is organizing these events as part of the COVID-19 American History Project.
This blog post commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday draws on interviews recorded for the Civil Rights History Project collection, accompanied by selected images in the Glen Pearcy collection. The narratives offers viewpoints on the topic of non-violent direct action such as Dr. King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” tensions surrounding the formation of SNCC, and the reality of life on the front lines for activists confronted by violent segregationists .
This blog highlights a new episode of the Folklife Today podcast, which explores an important collection of Gullah Geechee sound recordings in the archives of the American Folklife Center. The collection features over four hours of Gullah Geechee people singing sacred music, preaching to congregations, and giving testimonies in 1955 and 1956. Courtney Siceloff, then-director of Penn Community Services, recorded this collection at community centers and churches across St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Dr. Eric Crawford, Interim Chair of the Music Department at Claflin University and the author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (University of South Carolina Press), joins this episode to contextualize these recordings and to inform listeners about the people who made them.
The following is a guest blog post by Candace Milburn, liaison specialist with the Veterans History Project. Have you ever wondered what a Warrant Officer does in the military? When I hear the word “warrant,” my mind immediately goes to think about an arrest warrant or police searches. But during a recent documentary screening at …
Readers are encouraged to take a virtual road trip through AFC's digital collections in celebration of National Road Trip Day, observed on the Friday before the Memorial Day Weekend.
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.
The first interviews documented for the COVID-19 American History Project--an initiative of the American Folklife Center to create an archival collection of Americans' experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic--are now available in the online collections of the Library of Congress. In this post, learn more about the workers featured in the interviews, find out how to access their stories, and explore how you can have your pandemic story preserved as part of the COVID-19 American History Project.
In 2023, the American Folklife Center contracted Gran Enterprises LLC to conduct interviews with licensed funeral professionals about their COVID-19 pandemic experiences for the COVID-19 American History Project. This post is an interview with Anita Grant and Joél Maldonado of Gran Enterprises. In it, they detail their inspiration for the project, their initial findings, and why documenting licensed funeral professionals' pandemic experiences is important for understanding Americans' experiences with COVID-19.
On June 13th, a new exhibition titled, “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress,” opened to the public in the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery in the Thomas Jefferson Building. This post highlights items from the collections of the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project featured in the exhibition.
