For 25 years, the Veterans History Project (VHP) at the Library of Congress has collected the firsthand stories of America’s veterans and preserved them for future generations. As VHP celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are highlighting some of the many ways that veterans’ stories continue to inspire new conversations, creative work and connections with audiences. On September …
As the northern hemisphere heads into another hot summer, it is the perfect time to learn more about a staple of summer clothing -- linen. In this post, AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas takes readers through the process of turning flax into fiber, and then into woven cloth, as demonstrated in the Center's archival collections.
This blog post commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday draws on interviews recorded for the Civil Rights History Project collection, accompanied by selected images in the Glen Pearcy collection. The narratives offers viewpoints on the topic of non-violent direct action such as Dr. King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” tensions surrounding the formation of SNCC, and the reality of life on the front lines for activists confronted by violent segregationists .
Here at "Folklife Today," we've been following the history of Jack tales, from their emergence in the late Middle Ages to their adoption into modern literature and media. In our last installment, we traced Jack in both fantasy literature and more realistic fiction. In this post, we'll look at Jack tales in other arts, from drama and film to sculpture and comics. We embed the Library of Congress restoration of the 1902 film “Jack and the Beanstalk” from the Thomas Edison corporation, as well as links to orally told folktales, film adaptations, and other media.
The Creek Rocks, the first recipients of the American Folklife Center’s Artists in Resonance fellowship, will return to the Library of Congress on August 21 to perform in the Coolidge Auditorium. They’ll be playing their own arrangements of songs they gleaned from AFC’s deep Ozark Mountain collections as part of their fellowship research. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the band and link you to some fun resources, including music, interviews, and an Ozark mountain podcast. And, of course, we’ll provide the concert details!
The American Folklife Center is delighted to announce that 40 more Archive Challenge videos have gone online. In the Archive Challenge, the American Folklife Center helps accomplished musicians and groups select a song from the archive, put their own spin on it, and play it in a special showcase. This set of one-song videos thus features a diverse array of musicians interpreting materials from the American Folklife Center archive. The newly published set includes videos from the Folk Alliance International conferences in 2024 and 2025, along with a wayward set of 2020 videos that were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They include folk and blues performers from near and far—including the U.S., Canada, Scotland, France, Nigeria, Haiti, New Zealand, and Australia. Find a sampler of embedded videos, along with the field recordings that inspired them, in this blog post, along with links to each year's videos.
We continue our exploration of Jack tales with a look at printed collections of stories. The prominence of Richard Chase’s 1943 book “The Jack Tales” has tended to obscure other valuable collections, both before and after his publication. We’ll look at works from a wide variety of authors: collectors from oral tradition, including Isabel Gordon Carter, Vance Randolph, Leonard Roberts, and Herbert Halpert; storytellers, including Donald Davis, Jackie Torrence, and Duncan Williamson; and folklorists and anthologists such as Joseph Jacobs, Carl Lindahl, William Bernard McCarthy, and Anita Best. There's also embedded audio of Maud Long and Duncan Williamson, and links to other audio versions of Jack tales you can enjoy!
A few weeks ago we published two blog posts introducing the American Folklife Center's rich folktale collections. We focused on "Jack Tales," those stories telling the adventures of a tricky, resourceful young man named Jack. We included audio of many Jack tales within those posts, but length limitations prevented us from embedding the texts of the stories as well. So, to make the stories more accessible to a wider audience, we'll be posting a few blogs with transcriptions of some of the stories we presented in those blogs. We'll begin with "Jack and the Northwest Wind," as told by Maud Long.
Earlier this year, I had the chance to delve through the fieldnotes from the Pinelands Folklife Project for a post celebrating American Wetlands Month. I used a number of quotes from these accounts, but there were many more that I wanted to highlight and didn’t have space for. The prose – some humorous, some profound, …
