Carol M. Highsmith, photographer. The 1897 brick Queen Anne-style John Dorius Jr. House, named after a prominent local business leader in the city of Ephraim (pronounced "EEF-rum) in Utah's Sanpete Valley, sometimes called "Little Denmark" after the large number of Scandinavian (especially Danish) newcomers who settled there. 2021. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
With the passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201), the American Folklife Center (AFC) began its mission to collect and make accessible the vast range of traditional cultural expressions in the United States and throughout the world. A research guide, American Folklife Center Collections: Denmark presents the AFC materials that display Danish folkways in Denmark, as well as in the United States. The page here provides a summary of that research guide, which must be brief and therefore can only offer some of the highlights available in the American Folklife Center.
Collections of particular note are the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection; the Percy Grainger Collection of Danish Folk Music and Spoken Word; the Marcus Bach “Preserving Iowa’s Cultural Heritage Collection” part 2; the Marcus Bach “Preserving Iowa’s Cultural Heritage Collection” part 3; and the University of Wisconsin Project.
N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), the founding father of modern Denmark, who made a significant impact in the fields of poetry, philosophy, theology, mythology, history, government, and pedagogy, never visited the United States, but his lasting contribution to adult education, the folk high school, can be found scattered throughout the country. The AFC holds Catherine Hiebert Kerst’s doctoral dissertation, Enlightenment, Fellowship. and Celebration at the Danebod Folk Meeting: Danish-American Grundtvigian Cultural Expression in the Spirit of the Old Folk School. For those onsite at the Library of Congress, this dissertation can also be accessed from the Library of Congress E-Resources Online Catalog, in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress to "preserve and present American folklife" through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibitions, publications, and training. Designated by the U.S. Congress as the national center for folklife documentation and research, the American Folklife Center continues to collect and document living traditional culture, while preserving for the future its unparalleled collections in the state-of-the-art preservation facilities of the Library of Congress.
