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.
Recently, the American Folklife Center (AFC) published a new collection for the Occupational Folklife Project, "Poultry Workers in North Carolina," on the website of the Library of Congress. In this post, AFC Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce interviews Dr. Leigh Campoamor, the anthropologist and recipient of the AFC's Archie Green Fellowship who interviewed 18 poultry workers for the collection.
Un Homenaje: CCG Collection Pays Tribute to Houston's Chicano Music Pioneers
The AFC has launched the website, Sonidos De Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene, a fieldwork collecting project conducted through a Community Collections Grant. The blog describes the collections content, which features interviews of Houston's Chicano music pioneers conducted by community members, several of whom are musicians themselves . The blog includes audio clips and photographs and reactions to the collections and the website’s launch from an interview conducted with the Principal Investigator, Isaac Rodriguez.
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 …
In this post, the American Folklife Center announces a new online collection for the COVID-19 American History Project. The collection, titled Reflections from the COVID-19 Pandemic from Last Responders, features 19 oral history interviews with embalmers, funeral home owners, and other funeral professionals about their pandemic experiences. The collection was created by Anita Grant, Joél Maldonado, and Jasmine Johnson, of Gran Enterprises LLC, between 2023 and 2024.
Happy 250th birthday to the United States Army! Today, the Veterans History Project (VHP) debuts the newest installment of our online exhibit, Serving: Our Voices. This feature launches the celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday, which will officially be observed on June 14, 2025. The modern U.S. Army is rooted in the establishment of the …
On March 12 and 13, 2026, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress will host a symposium titled, “From Lived Experience to Public Memory: Commemorating, Documenting, and Archiving Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The American Folklife Center is now accepting proposals for the symposium from scholars, artists, documentarians, archivists, and community-based practitioners working at the intersection of COVID-19 and cultural heritage. In this post, find more information about the symposium and how to submit a proposal.
In the concluding half of a two-part blog series, AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas unpacks some of the contradictions between a true-crime oral history and the historical record, and reveals the eventual outcome of the trial.
This post recounts three stories of formal dresses that were made out of World War II silk parachutes. In two cases, they were wedding dresses, meaning that silk once intended for war had been transformed into a symbol of new beginnings. These stories are striking reminders that history isn’t just found in archives or interviews—it’s stitched into uniforms, tucked into footlockers and woven into parachute silk transformed into wedding gowns. These everyday artifacts speak volumes, capturing emotion, memory and meaning in ways words sometimes cannot. The stories come from the collections of the Veterans History Project.
