Happy birthday, VHP! The Veterans History Project (VHP) officially turns 20 years old this year, and today we launch a new online exhibit as part of the festivities. Titled “Celebrating 20 Years of VHP: Staff Favorites,” the exhibit focuses on collections chosen by staff members of the Veterans History Project and American Folklife Center (AFC). […]
Calling all college and university educators: we want to help you, and need to know what you need! Please take our survey here! To be more precise about our survey, it is aimed at professors, instructors, librarians, and practitioners who are teaching classes in folklore, ethnomusicology, American studies, area studies, and allied fields. We want […]
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Charles Hosale. A little more than one year ago, the American Folklife Center announced the acquisition of the AIDS Memorial Quilt records . My colleagues and I continue work to preserve the records and make them accessible. This year, living under the weight of another […]
This is a guest post by Colleen Benoit Kim, Senior Archives Specialist in the Manuscript Division. Editors note: this post explores one of our LC colleagues’ favorite VHP collections. Watch this space for upcoming blog posts written by AFC and VHP staff about their own favorite VHP collections, part of our newest Experiencing War web […]
Happy Thanksgiving! In this post, we’ll take a look at a set of interesting photos from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. They depict a custom most people nowadays don’t know much about: Thanksgiving masking. Thanksgiving maskers, like trick-or-treaters on contemporary Halloween, used to go door to door, begging for handouts. They also […]
Thanksgiving days were declared by United States Presidents at various times in American history, beginning with George Washington making November 26, 1789, a day of thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving was not established as a regular yearly Federal holiday until 1870. So there are not a great many songs specifically for American Thanksgiving, and these were composed […]
The following is a guest blog post by liaison specialist Owen Rogers about the November 11, 2020 completion and programing surrounding the National Native American Veterans Memorial. American Indians and Alaska Natives comprise less than 1% of the United States population. They boast a higher percentage of veterans than any other ethnicity and a tradition of […]
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 […]
Time is getting short before Halloween, so we’re combining two announcements in this one blog post! First of all, as our readers may remember, we’ve been working with No Depression, The Journal of Roots Music, which is published by the nonprofit Freshgrass Foundation. They’re publishing a column called Roots in the Archive, featuring content from the […]
In his book The Folk Songs of North America, in an introduction to one of the American Folklife Center’s finest songs about the Devil, Alan Lomax wrote:
Early America saw the Devil as a real and living personage. Rocks in New England were scarred by his hoofprints, as he carried off maidens, screaming and howling, over the hills, or came after the men who had sold their souls to him in return for money or success. […] A mountain woman tells of the last moments of her mean old husband…’I knowed he war goin’, because all the dogs from fur and nigh come around and howled. Hit wur a dark night. But plain as day, comin’ down yon side the mountain, through the bresh so thickety a butcher knife couldn’t cut hit, I seen the Devil a-comin’. He war ridin’ a coal-black cart, drivin’ a coal-black oxen. The cart come down to the door and stopped. When it come, it come empty. But when it went away, hit had a big black ball in it that war Arzy’s soul. […] Lomax’s passage serves as a fine and atmospheric introduction to our own Halloween exploration of the Devil in folksongs from the American Folklife Center archive!