Related Online Resources

Through blog posts, podcasts and videos presentations of public programs and concerts, you can learn more about the American Folklife Center's collections directly from folklorists, specialists, and performers.

Folklife Today Blog

Folklife Today is a blog for people interested in folklore, folklife, and oral history. The blog features brief articles on folklife topics, highlighting the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, especially the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project.

View ALL Folklife Today Blog Posts

Highlighted Blogs

“People Who Stood Up”: Mississippi Women in the Civil Rights Movement
Catherine Turner discusses a selection of women interviewed as part of the Civil Rights History Project. (Folklife Today: June 4, 2017)
Becky Elzy and Alberta Bradford: Spiritual Folklorists
Folklorist Stephen Winick honors honor two prodigious collectors of African American spirituals, Becky Elzy and Aberta Bradford. (Folklife Today blog: February 28, 2018)
Alabama Folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt
Folklorist Stephanie Hall discusses the important work of Ruby Pickens Tartt. (Folklife Today blog: January 12, 2019)
Symbolism in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
Folklorist Stephanie Hall discusses intended and unintended symbols of the efforts to win women's suffrage. (Folklife Today blog: August 24, 2020)

Search Folklife Today

Search Women's History

American Folklife Center Podcasts

Discover the treasures of the Library through its experts and special guests. Find full podcast series produced by the American Folklife Center by following the links below.

Folklife Today Podcast Series
Folklife Today tells stories about the cultural traditions and folklore of diverse communities, combining brand-new interviews and narration with songs, stories, music, and oral history from the collections of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
America Works Podcast Series
America Works, an ongoing podcast series from the Library of Congress, features the voices of contemporary workers from throughout the United States talking about their lives, their workplaces, and their on-the-job experiences. Drawn from hundreds of longer oral history interviews collected by fieldworkers for the American Folklife Center’s Occupational Folklife Project (OFP), America Works is a testament to the wisdom, wit, knowledge, and dedication of today’s working Americans. These engaging oral histories, which have are preserved in the American Folklife Center’s archive, are enriching and expanding America’s historical record.

Highlighted Podcasts

Agnes Vanderburg’s Outdoor School for Traditional Indian Ways
Hosts John Fenn and Stephen Winick Discuss the work of Agnes Vanderburg, a Salish elder from Montana who began an outdoor school to teach traditional native American ways, including Salish language, food preparation, crafting with porcupine quills, making tipis, and traditional medicine. They interview Stephanie Hall, who researched Vanderburg for the Folklife Today blog, Trelani Duncan, who did further research for this podcast, Carl Fleischhauer, who knew and photographed Vanderburg in the 1970s, Judith Gray, who gives an overview of Native American field recordings in the Library of Congress, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Marjorie Hunt, who worked with Agnes Vanderburg in the 1980s.
The Green Book and African American Travel with Candacy Taylor
This episode presents an interview with Candacy Taylor, whose latest project is documenting sites associated with the Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. (Folklife Today Podcast: February 25, 2021)
Explore the Folklife Today Podcast Series

Public Programs

Since its inception in 1976, the American Folklife Center has routinely hosted public programs at the Library of Congress in the form of concerts, lectures, panels, and symposia. From 2006 on, most of these public programs have been video recorded and made available online.

Playlists and Series

There are a number of playlists available on the YouTube page that gather videos from certain seasons of our Homegrown Concert series External or pull together various lectures as a sampler External of the types of topics covered. You can also simply search "folklife" on the YouTube page External to pull up hundreds of videos.

It is also possible to view entire series of American Folklife Center videos on the Library's website. Those links are provided below. Many (if not all) of the same videos can be found on the Library's YouTube channel.

Homegrown Concerts and artist oral histories
Over 200 videos of Homegrown concerts and oral history interviews with artists, dating back to 2005. The concerts take place in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium, Whittall Pavilion, Madison Hall, or a setting of the artists' choosing (largely from 2020 through 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic).
Benjamin Botkin lecture series
Videos from lectures, panels, and symposia that AFC has hosted over the years. The earliest videos are from 2005, and go on up through the most recent events.

Highlighted Public Programs

New York Times bestselling author Liza Mundy discussed her book "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the Women Code Breakers of World War II." Mundy used Library collections to provide her with overall background information and context when writing the book, and featured a few women veterans from the Library's Veterans History Project collections. That event, coupled with the book's increasing popularity, started a national conversation about these unsung women. Loved ones of the "Code Girls" reached out to the author, formed an unofficial online community and overwhelmingly agreed that it was time to draw attention to and preserve this important piece of American history. "Code Girls" who were uniformed members of the U.S. military or their surviving next-of-kin (including famed Science Guy Bill Nye) were asked to donate a collection to the Library as part of the event.

An evening of storytelling with Connie Regan-Blake and Barbara Freeman. In the 1970s, the cousins were both working at the Chattanooga Public Library, Freeman as children's librarian and Regan-Blake as a full-time storyteller for a special outreach program called MORE. In 1973, they attended the first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. There they met Ray and Rosa Hicks of Beech Mountain, N.C., who became lasting friends and mentors. They realized they had a special gift for telling stories, and left their careers at the library to perform nationally and internationally as the Folktellers. Regan-Blake and Freeman pioneered "tandem telling," a type of duet storytelling performance. In addition to performances, the Folktellers have produced three albums and a play, "Mountain Sweet Talk." (Event date: September 06, 2018)

American Women: Resources from the American Folklife Center

American Folklife Center: Ask a Librarian