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.
Recently, the American Folklife Center published a new collection from the Occupational Folklife Project, which features 16 interviews with religious workers in Kentucky and Indiana. In this post, Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce interviews folklorist Taylor Dooley Burden, who created the collection with support from an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center.
At the beginning of July, the American Folklife Center (AFC) welcomed two of three interns that we’ll be hosting this summer, and the third will join us in the middle of the month. These interns will be working directly with AFC staff on projects that support our core activities around public programming and researcher support. In this post, learn about our summer interns and their areas of expertise.
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.
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.
The American Folklife Center announces the launch of the Chicago 1977: People, Places, and Cultures transcription campaign, as part of the Library of Congress By the People volunteer transcription initiative, and based on the Center's Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection from 1977.
In 2023, the American Folklife Center contracted folklorist Nicole Musgrave to conduct interviews with Appalachian-based child care workers about their COVID-19 pandemic experiences for the COVID-19 American History Project. The post, guest authored by Musgrave, details her inspiration for the project, the initial findings from her interviews, and why documenting child care workers' pandemic experiences is important for understanding Americans' experiences with COVID-19.
On April 10, 2024, Dr. Melissa Cooper (Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark) presented a fascinating lecture on Gullah Geechee cultural history at the Library of Congress, as part of the American Folklife Center's Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture Series. In this post, we highlight the video recording of Cooper's lecture and an oral history interview with Cooper, conducted by American Folklife Center staff members.
