Folklorist Tom Burns, working as a fieldworker in the Rhode Island Folklife Project in 1979, sought out the Narragansett people, crossing the border into Connecticut to find tribal leaders with whom to talk. At that time the Narragansetts were somewhat spread out, as they had no lands. What they did have was a strong desire […]
The following is a guest post by Matt McCrady, a Digital Conversion Specialist for the Library of Congress. Particularly during wartime, joining the military often means putting on hold important aspects of one’s life, such as college or marriage. Similarly, the unexpected draft notice can mean the end of a promising college athlete’s hope for […]
Normally, the Homegrown Plus series is a way to bring together the videos of Homegrown concerts with other information about the artists, including oral history interviews. This time, however, we have a more solemn duty: to celebrate the life and legacy of Nakotah LaRance, an outstanding Native American hoop dancer from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, New […]
Earlier this week, the Veterans History Project (VHP) launched a new online exhibit to highlight the stories of veteran “changemakers.” You might be asking yourself, who or what is a changemaker, exactly, and why are we focusing on them? In early 2019, the Library of Congress launched a year-long initiative to explore the stories of […]
August 2019 marks 400 years since a group of about 20 Africans were brought to the new colony of Virginia and traded as slaves for food. It was the beginning of African slavery in the continental British colonies that became the United States. The events of 1619 are well documented and the British became the […]
Episode eight of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In this episode. John Fenn and I discuss the work of Agnes Vanderburg, a Salish elder from Montana who began an outdoor school […]
June 6, 2019, marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allies’ famed invasion of the beaches of Normandy. In honor of this momentous occasion, the Veterans History Project (VHP) is publishing a special series of blog posts revealing hidden facets of D-Day illuminated within VHP’s collections. This post is the fifth in a six-part series, […]
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 […]
This photo of an unknown Crow Indian girl has always fascinated me. Everything about her tells a story — but I don’t know the full story. The American Folklife Center’s Montana Field Survey, which includes this photo, was done fairly quickly, identifying places and people that might be studied in more depth at a later […]
In the summer of 1894 James Mooney, a scholar of American Indian culture and language, made recordings of songs of the Ghost Dance in several languages. The James Money Recordings of American Indian Ghost Dance Songs have recently been updated and are part of the presentation, Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry. […]