On this site, you will find links to manuscripts, unique images, archival repositories and their finding aids, sound recordings, and more. Explore as much as your time permits. Start with the four “quantitative interrogatives”: who? what? when? where? Use these questions to guide your discovery.
— Dr. Melanie Zeck
Bring Me to Phenomenal Women Bring Me to Symphony No. 7
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) documents and shares the many expressions of human experience to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions. Designated by the U.S. Congress as the national center for folklife documentation and research, the Center meets its mission by stewarding archival collections, creating public programs, and exchanging knowledge and expertise. The Center’s vision is to encourage diversity of expression and foster community participation in the collective creation of cultural memory.
Make the most of your visit to the American Folklife Center.
Learn more about the women in Valerie Coleman’s Phenomenal Women by exploring the following AFC collections.
Collection consists of videocassettes and video discs of about 300 full-length oral history interviews with noted African American leaders conducted by Camille O. Cosby, Renee Poussaint, and others for the National Visionary Leadership Project from 1997 to 2009, and includes photographs of the interviewees taken at the time of the interviews.
*(transcript available on request; video viewable at AFC)
StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. It was founded in October 2003 by Dave Isay, a radio producer and founder of Sound Portraits Productions, with the opening of a StoryBooth in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The importance of role models—famous or familial—feature in many of the collection’s interviews.
To hear more music from the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia, come to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to explore the archival collections. Despite the word “American” in its title, the American Folklife Center has ethnographical materials in over 500 languages, documenting cultural expression around the world. The Center also holds collections featuring performances of Czech Americans. Learn how to make the most of your visit to the American Folklife Center.
The Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools in America Project was conducted in 1982 by the American Folklife Center to survey selected religious and secular ethnic community-based schools conducted, at least in part, in a language other than English to document the continued ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity of the United States. The collection consists of field notes, interviews, curriculum materials, sound recordings, photographs, and one videorecording resulting from a survey conducted by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress in 1982 which documented 23 ethnic schools in the United States. Fieldwork was conducted at various locations including a Czech school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
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