The following is a guest post by Rachel Telford, Program Specialist at the Veterans History Project. When Veterans History Project staff members are called upon to identify particularly interesting, poignant, or visually appealing collections in our archive, one name that comes up again and again is Kenje Ogata. A Japanese-American who fought for more than …
For Women’s History Month, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some examples of interviews with women and girls in American English Dialects: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection. This online collection is one of several dialect collections in the American Folklife Center archive. With a little digging, such collections can yield exciting examples of …
The following is a guest post by Lisa A. Taylor, liaison specialist with the Veterans History Project. A version of this blog post ran on the Library of Congress Blog on March 13th. Disabled combat hero, veterans’ advocate, politician, woman. U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) is many things, most strikingly, a person who has not …
As I write this blog post on March 13, it is 29 degrees here in Washington, DC, and it seems impossible to believe that spring will arrive in just over a week. Emerging from one of the snowiest and coldest winters that many regions of the country have seen in decades, in which the phrase …
Note: This blog post is reprinted from Library of Congress Magazine, for which it was written by Stephen Winick and edited by Audrey Fischer. The full issue contains two more articles about the American Folklife Center’s oral-history collections. You can download it here. Preserving America’s Voices: Who’s Listening? How Can We Use Oral-History Collections to …
The following is a guest post by Rachel Telford, Program Specialist for the Veterans History Project. Founded 73 years ago this month, the United Service Organizations (USO) was created at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide entertainment and recreation to members of the military. Six civilian service organizations – the Salvation Army, …
Although folksingers Pete Seeger, Guy Carawan, and Frank Hamilton registered copyright on “We Shall Overcome” in 1960, the song has a long and fascinating history with contributions from many activist-singers. We can trace it back to two separate songs from over a hundred years ago, the lyrics from “I’ll Overcome Some Day” written by the …
When the New Year arrives, thoughts often turn to what the coming year might bring. During wartime, service members inevitably wonder if the next year will be the year: the long-anticipated time when peace is declared and they can reunite with their families after so many months spent apart. For soldiers fighting in the Pacific …
In addition to my work cataloging new oral histories for the Civil Rights History Project, I am also working on other collections related to the civil rights movement and African American history. One of these collections is the Voices of Civil Rights Project, a nationwide initiative of AARP conducted over the years 2003 to 2005. …
