2019 Proposals due March 12, 2019 The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress offers three competitive awards in 2019 to support scholars working with ethnographic collection materials at the Library of Congress and for fieldworkers on folklife and related topics. This year, the American Folklife Center’s Archie Green Fellowship, Parsons Fund Award, and […]
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with The Rahim AlHaj Trio, an ensemble based in New Mexico playing Arabic and Persian music. The trio is led by Rahim AlHaj, an […]
This is a guest post by two staff from the Muslim American Leadership Alliance: Ahmed Omar (Deputy Director) and Andrew McDonald (Program Associate). In 2017 the American Folklife Center hosted staff from the Alliance along with contributors to their “Muslim American Journeys” project to participate in a public listening session at the Library of Congress, […]
In the last post, we made our way to UNESCO’s 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, tracing some key changes in precursor definitions for what is now called ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (ICH). I will return to the ICH concept’s development, but let’s make a pit stop to look more closely at […]
Episode four 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! Our latest podcast episode, “Kumbaya: Stories of an African American Spiritual,” presents some of the background to this classic old song, along with many […]
Many listeners who downloaded the NPR podcast Hidden Brain, or who heard it when it aired on their local affiliates this past weekend, got a glimpse of what it’s like to research folklife collections here at the Library of Congress. In the show, host Shankar Vedantam describes a trip to the stacks to retrieve the collection […]
The following is a guest blog post by Brandon Lithalangsy, a student at the University of Central Arkansas, and former intern in the office of Senator John Boozman (AR). Being in the military, there are times we forget about those who have left the service. It is important to remember their stories and the lessons […]
If asked her about her profession, Ruby Pickens Tartt (1880-1974) would say that she was a painter. In an era when Alabama women rarely attended college, she graduated from the Chase School of Art in New York and painted and taught painting for much of her life. But folklorists consider her one of their own. She was […]
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with the Yvette Landry Trio, a trio from Louisiana that plays Cajun Music and Louisiana Honky-Tonk. The group is led by Yvette Landry from Breaux […]
The following is a guest post by Ellen McHale, Ph.D., creator of the Occupational Folklife Project collection Stable Views: Stories and Voices from the Thoroughbred Racetrack. Explore the collection at this link! My introduction to the racetrack and its world of racing began in 1996, when I was asked by the National Museum of Racing and […]