The following post was written by AFC’s Cathy Kerst. Documenting California Sounds and Communities: The Story of Migration and Settlement from the New Deal Era to the Present The Library’s newly-appointed Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, spent the afternoon of September 9 in the American Folklife Center, with the intent of experiencing some ethnographic materials …
The following installment in Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus post introduces James P. Leary, a distinguished folklorist and researcher who has published extensively on Library of Congress collections in the American Folklife Center. In addition to his lecture video, it includes photos, audio, and video from AFC's collections of Midwestern folk music, including Croatian, French, Scandinavian, Oneida, English, Welsh, and other ethnic groups. Most of the quotations from Leary in this article come from an email interview we did in July 2015, but I also quote occasionally from the lecture itself, which is also here as an embedded video.
On this snowy January day, I’d like to wish the readers of Folklife Today a happy end to the holiday season. Many people take down their Christmas decorations immediately after the day itself, and others use New Year’s Day as the end of their holiday. But among many communities, the Christmas season culminates after Twelfth …
