The following is a blog post in honor of National Poetry Month. While walking the halls of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, it is not difficult to be inspired by the Lyric Poetry Hall. I have often wondered what artists and poets have ventured through these halls for the past 122 years. Were …
This is a guest post by Sam Meier, a former LC Junior Fellow who is currently working on a variety of reference-related projects for the Veterans History Project (VHP). December 25, 1917 found William James Bean in quarantine at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York. Bean had been inducted into the Army a little more …
The Folklife Today Halloween Podcast is Live As we hope you’ve come to expect, we have something very special in store this Halloween. As I mentioned in our last post, we’re launching the Folklife Today Podcast on October 29, and hey…that’s today! The first episode is called “Haunting Tunes for Halloween.” It’s hosted by John …
This is part two of a three-part series presenting the lesson suggestions on the Explore Your Community Poster (PDF), designed for middle school and high school classrooms. Read Part One. Read Part Three. Community Culture: It’s All Around You One important aspect of culture that is hard to remember when when we go out to …
This is a guest post from Julia Kim, Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center. This Thanksgiving, StoryCorps invites everyone to take part in The Great Listen, a national movement that empowers young people–and people of all ages–to create an oral history of the contemporary United States by recording an interview with an elder …
For the last two weekends of November, 2016, AFC was honored to be featured on The Thistle & Shamrock, the long-running and popular Celtic music show produced and hosted by Fiona Ritchie and distributed by NPR. If you want to hear the shows, follow the links to part 1 here and part 2 here. The …
Thanks to The Great Thanksgiving Listen, the StoryCorps collection of interviews has doubled! Since the launch of StoryCorps.me mobile app in March, more than 68,000 interviews have been uploaded as of today—the vast majority of them in the few days following Thanksgiving. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is the archival home …
The following is a guest post by VHP Liaison Specialist Owen Rogers, and is the second in a three-part series. Trying to make it… Home. A permanent fixture in our lives, “home” has both place and meaning, and many veterans meticulously documented their journey home through photographs, manuscripts and correspondence. Numbering among the “transplant” community …
It’s hard to believe, but October 30, 2014 is the first anniversary of Folklife Today! A lot can happen in a year, so we thought we’d take a little trip through the highlights of our first year. I’ll begin with the sad things. Just three months after our debut, the great folksinger Pete Seeger died, …
