This is a guest blog post by Julia Kim, Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center. Do you have precious VHS tapes of special family events that you want preserved in the digital age? Are you perplexed about what it takes to digitize your organization’s recordings? If so, you are invited to Memory XFR, […]
The following is a blog post by Lisa Gomez and Sam Meier, Junior Fellows working for the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. To read their previous blog posts from this summer, go here and here. Lisa’s flashback to 2015: I have a vivid memory of listening to Ashton Carter, then-Secretary of Defense, announce that the […]
Way back when Folklife Today celebrated our 100th post, I highlighted one of Alan Lomax’s collecting triumphs, the disc numbered AFS 100. For this, our 500th post, I thought I’d do a similar story about AFS 500. This disc was also recorded by Alan Lomax, during a field trip to the Bahamas in 1935 which […]
When I was growing up going swimming near home usually meant going to a public pool, or possibly a nearby man-made lake. But when we visited relatives in the summer swimming more often was at the beach, at a lake, or at a quiet section of a river. I liked swimming in natural waters, but […]
The following is a guest post by Sam Meier, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. For decades, women’s military careers have been constrained by the assumption that they are less physically capable than men. Even today, those who oppose complete gender integration often assert that gender-based […]
The following is a guest post by Lisa Gomez, a Library of Congress Junior Fellow working with the Veterans History Project (VHP) this summer. This summer, while serving as an LC Junior Fellow, I’ve had the honor and opportunity to explore the fascinating collections of photographs and oral histories archived by the Veterans History Project. […]
This summer, the American Folklife Center is hosting a series of informal jams to celebrate our living folk traditions, and to bring to life the collections from our vast ethnographic archive. The idea grew out of the jam we held to honor our founding director, Alan Jabbour (see a video here), and the series started […]
The American Folklife Center is sad to pass on the news that San Diego folk arts promoter Louis F. Curtiss has died. He passed away at home on July 8. Curtiss was a founder of the San Diego Folk Festival, the owner of Folk Arts Rare Records, and a longtime festival and concert promoter and […]
In the last post, the Folklife at the International Level series took a turn into the world of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH), a category of heritage on the global stage that developed decades ago, thanks to the joint efforts of WIPO and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). As noted, since the […]
The following is a guest blog post by Mary Claire Phillips, a recent graduate of University of Texas at Austin. Phillips utilized Veterans History Project (VHP) collections in her journal article and honors thesis examining the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) servicewomen during World War II. Happy Pride! This month marks the […]