For the Birds
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
Celebrate the end of the annual Great Backyard Bird Count (and perhaps learn a thing or two about said backyard birds) through selections from the American Folklife Center's archive.
Posted in: Animals
Category: Animals
Dog Days of August: Wait, That’s Not a Dog!
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
This fourth and final entry in the Dog Days of August series puts a spin on the topic and looks at another member of the Canidae family that can be found in the American Folklife Center's collections.
Posted in: Animals, Collection Highlight, Dog Days of August
Dog Days of August: Dogs Being Dogs
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
This third installment of a month-long series featuring photographs of dogs from the American Folklife Center highlights the playful (and snoozing) pups whose pictures can be found throughout the Center's archival collections.
Posted in: Animals, Collection Highlight, Dog Days of August
Dog Days of August: Dogs of War
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
The second entry in a month-long series on the Dog Days of August, highlighting American Folklife Center collections items featuring "man's best friend," this post presents the story of war dog Lucky, who served with the United States Marine Corps in WWII, alongside photographs of other dogs found in collections in the Veterans History Project.
Posted in: Animals, Collection Highlight, Dog Days of August, Veterans History Project
Dog Days of August: Dogs at Work
Posted by: Meg Nicholas
The first entry in a month-long series on the Dog Days of August, highlighting American Folklife Center collections items featuring "man's best friend," this post presents audio recordings and photographs about dogs at work.
Posted in: Animals, Collection Highlight, Dog Days of August
Caught My Eye: Buckaroos and Barbecues
Posted by: Allina Migoni
This is a guest blog post by Drew Holley, a master's student in the Folklore Studies program at Utah State University with a particular interest in food and film. Drew completed his internship at the American Folklife Center earlier this year. Today’s blog will showcase foodways collections (traditions and practices surrounding food) found at the American Folklife Center.
Posted in: Animals, Foodways, Internship program
Homegrown Plus Premiere: Tlacuatzin Son Huasteco from Mexico
Posted by: Stephen Winick
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Tlacuatzin Son Huasteco, a trio playing one of the traditional music styles of eastern Mexico, known as son huasteco or huapango music; As is usual for the series, this blog post includes an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore! Son huasteco music is built around two variants of the guitar, the jarana and the quinta huapanguera, as well as the violin and the voice. Son huasteco singing employs a distinctive falsetto style. Improvisation plays a strong role in this music, with each group adding their own lyrics and arrangements to a standard repertoire of songs. The result is acoustic string-band music that is both traditional and contemporary, with direct emotional appeal.
Posted in: Hispanic American History, Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus, Homegrown Premieres, opossums
Politics and Possum Feasts: Presidents Who Ate Opossums
Posted by: Stephen Winick
A photo in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division (known colloquially around the institution as P & P) shows white men in formal attire, sitting row upon row at tables, apparently waiting to be served. The caption, which came to us with the photo itself, is “’Possum’ dinner tendered to President-elect William Howard …
A Possum Crisp and Brown: The Opossum and American Foodways
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is the third in a series of posts about folklife related to the Virginia Opossum, the only marsupial native to the United States. Find the series here! In 1910, Maggie Pogue Johnson, an African American woman from Virginia, published a dialect poem about classic African American cuisine, or what we would today call “soul food.” …