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Posted by: Stephen Winick
As we get closer and closer to Halloween, the Library of Congress feels spookier and spookier! Just look at the black cat in our Halloween graphic above! In fact, the Library has just released a new web guide to Halloween resources, which can be found here. The new web page will act as your guide through our rich …
Posted in: Halloween, Halloween Stories, Holidays, Legends, Narratives, Storytelling
Posted by: Stephen Winick
A little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI (Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the …
Posted in: England, Folksong, Legends, Metafolklore (Folklore about Folklore)
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
When I was a kid, March signaled kite-flying time. A girl between two boys, I did what my brothers did, and the three of us would go to a large field near our home where kites had less chance of winding up in a tree. We flew diamond shaped kites that my mother favored, or …
Posted in: Games, Legends, Material Culture, Myths, Proverbs, Toys
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: this is the fifth, and probably the last, post on Folklife Today concerning Far Away Moses, a nineteenth century Jewish guide and merchant whose face was the model for one of the “keystone heads” sculpted in stone on the outside of the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson building. For the other posts about Moses, …
Posted in: AFC History, Far-Away Moses, Jewish American History, Jewish Americans, Legends, Proverbs, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This recollection is in memory of the Center’s founding director, Alan Jabbour, who died on January 13, 2017, and whose career and contributions are described in this blog post. Today’s text and photographs are by Carl Fleischhauer, a retired American Folklife Center staff member and a colleague of Alan’s for 46 years. Alan Jabbour and …
Posted in: AFC History, Alan Jabbour, Appalachia, Folk Music, Folklorists, Folksong, Legends, Oral History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: This is part of a series of posts about Far Away Moses, a fascinating celebrity of the 19th century, who served as the model for one of the keystone heads on the Thomas Jefferson Building. Moses, a Sephardic Jew from Constantinople, knew some of the most prominent Americans of his era, including Theodore Roosevelt …
Posted in: AFC History, Far-Away Moses, Jewish American History, Jewish Americans, Legends, Proverbs, Thomas Jefferson Building