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Posted by: Maria Peña
The Library of Congress has released a groundbreaking online collection of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt Records, making one of the most poignant symbols of the AIDS epidemic in the United States available to a global audience.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, LGBTQ, Library Work and Employees
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
In this edition of "My Job" at the Library, Aimee Hess talks about her work in editing and producing books that highlight the Library’s collections. She oversees the Library's Crime Classics series, has written two books in the "Women Who Dare" series and cowritten two books: one on the suffrage exhibition, “Shall Not Be Denied"; and one about the Library's photograph collections, “The Joy of Looking."
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, American Folklife Center, Crime Classics Series, LCM, Library of Congress Crime Classics, Library Work and Employees, Publishing Office, Womens History
Posted by: Maria Peña
Halloween and Día de los Muertos have centuries-long intertwined traditions, resulting in adjacent holidays that pull on international heritages.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Halloween, Hispanic American History, Hispanic and Latino, Hispanic Division
Posted by: Neely Tucker
The folklorist Sidney Robertson was one of the trailblazing American women of the 1930s and 1940s, the kind of life you’d associate with Martha Gellhorn, Dorothea Lange or Zora Neale Hurston. Her work directing the California Folk Music Project from 1938-40 is the subject "California Gold," a new book from the Library and the University of California Press.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Collections, Library Work and Employees, Lomax Collection, Music, Performing Arts, Preservation and Conservation, Women's History, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is often regarded as the largest folk art project ever created and the Library’s American Folklife Center has held the quilt’s archival collections since 2019. Parts of it are on display at the initial exhibit of the Library's Treasures Gallery, opening in June.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, LCM, LGBTQ
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Cormac Ó hAodha, a resident fellow in the John W. Kluge Center, is taking a deep dive into the Library's Alan Lomax Collection. Lomax, a major figure in 20th-century folklore and ethnomusicology, made field recordings in the Múscraí region of County Cork, Ireland, in the early 1950s. Ó hAodha is using those recordings as part of his Ph. D studies at the University College Cork into the history of the Múscraí song tradition.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Gazette, Kluge Center, Library Work and Employees, Lomax Collection, Music, Performing Arts, Preservation, Researcher Stories
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
The Library and three Native American tribes are collaborating on a project to digitize and restore some 9,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native Americans singing and telling stories from more than a century ago. The work is the subject of "Language is Life," a documentary narrated by Joy Harjo, the former U.S. poet laureate. It premiered at the Library in November in advance of its broadcast as part of the PBS series, “Native America.”
Posted in: American Folklife Center, LCM, Library Work and Employees, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Native Americans, Technology, U.S. Poet Laureate
Posted by: Maria Peña
he Library, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization StoryCorps, has launched the COVID-19 Archive Activation website to encourage everyone share their COVID-19 stories. Stories will be deposited into the American Folklife Center and made accessible at archive.StoryCorps.org. The new website is part of the COVID-19 American History Project — a congressionally mandated initiative to document and archive Americans’ experiences with the pandemic.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, COVID-19, Gazette, Influeza/Covid-19, Library Work and Employees
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Some of the U.S. military's best intelligence assets during both World Wars were Native American troops who used their own, unwritten languages as the basis for coded radio messages. These Code Talkers, particularly Navajo Marines, were invaluable in the Pacific theater of World War II. Twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers were later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Many of these soldiers' personal stories are preserved in the LIbrary's Veterans History Project.
Posted in: American Folklife Center, LCM, Native Americans, Veterans History Project, World War II