Northeast

Connecticut

Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area

The Upper Housatonic Valley includes locations related to contributions to the nation's literary, artistic, musical and architectural history, as well as America's iron, paper, and electrical equipment industries. The heritage area, which straddles the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts, is known currently for its scenic beautification and environmental conservation efforts.

An investigation of adolescent females in America's sub-cultures, 1980
Call Number: AFC 1980/008
Report of Margo Davis's Youthgrant project AY-00179-79-1354 conducted during her senior year in high school with the Audubon Expedition Institute for Environmental Education from October 1979-June 1980. Davis planned to interview young women aged 13-27, from Mormon, Mennonnite, Papago, Hopi, Hutterite, Colorado farming communities, and Maine fishing communities. Interviews were conducted in Lubec and Woodland, Maine; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Boulder, Utah; Yellowjacket, Colorado; Tucson and areas in northern Arizona; and Norfolk, Connecticut by Margo Davis under the supervision of Diana Cohen and other staff of the Audubon Expedition Institute
Joseph Sears oral history interview conducted by Michael O'Malley, 1986 May 19
Call Number: AFC 1986/010
An oral history interview with Joseph Sears, program director, social director, and emcee at the Alamac Country Club in Woodridge, New York during the 1940s. He worked at Camp Milford in Kent, Connecticut, and at Todem Lodge in Albany, New York, before working in the Catskill Mountains resort area (which he calls the "Borscht circuit") in the 1940s. Sears described his family, working routine, travel to the area, Yiddish-speaking clientele, ethnic traditions, Jewish humor, games, and entertainment at the resort and nearby hotels. The interview concludes with some discussion of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Recorded by Michael O'Malley in Brooklyn, New York, May 19, 1986. The collection includes a 94-page transcript of the interview and correspondence to Michael O'Malley from Joseph Hickerson at the American Folklife Center.

Maine

Downeast Maine National Heritage Area

The Downeast Maine National Heritage Area includes the entirety of Washington and Hancock Counties, from the St. Croix River to the Penobscot River, and from the Bold Coast to the Grand Lakes. The culture and customs of Downeast Maine are intricately tied to its natural resources, where fisheries, forest products, agriculture, wild blueberries, outdoor recreation and tourism are key to the region's heritage and economic development.

Search topics include: Hancock County, Maine; Washington County, Maine; Mount Desert Island; Acadia National Park; Wabanaki; Passamaquoddy; Bar Harbor

Jesse Walter Fewkes collection of Passamaquoddy cylinder recordings
Call Number: AFC 1972/003
Collection of field recordings of Passamaquoddy narratives, vocabulary, number lists, a few songs, and subsequent demonstrations of the Edison cylinder recording apparatus to a Passamaquoddy visitor, recorded by Jesse Walter Fewkes in Calais, Maine in March 1890. The 1890 recordings of Noel Joseph and Peter Selmore are the earliest known field recordings of Native American song and narrative on wax cylinders.

There is an online presence for this collection.

Horace P Beck collection of folk songs from Maine
Call Number: AFC 1951/013
Field recordings of traditional songs, ballads, sea songs, tunes played on harmonica, conversations and a poem from Maine.
Maine Folklife Center collection
Call Number: AFC 2012/047
Collection of field recordings, primarily of interviews with various residents of Maine and the Atlantic Maritime region on topics including boats and boat building, lobstering, fishing and commercial fisheries, environmental issues, etc. Recorded from 1960 to 2011.

Wayne Newell and Blanch Sockabasin, members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine, present songs, stories, hymns, and a discussion of the culture and language of the Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine as part of the Homegrown concert series sponsored by the American Folklife Center. Photographs, sound recordings and video recordings form the Wayne Newell and Blanch Sockabasin concert collection, 2009 September 16 (AFC 2009/018).

This panel discussion highlights a collaborative initiative to digitally restore, provide access to and curate the oldest recordings in the Library of Congress collections, the 1890s wax cylinder recordings of the Passamaquoddy tribal nation of Maine. The collaboration involves the Passamaquoddy community, the American Folklife Center and university-based digital platforms -- the Mukurtu content management system and Local Contexts, which develops Traditional Knowledge (TK) attribution labels for heritage materials based on indigenous cultural protocols. Passamaquoddy elders have been reviewing the sonically restored recordings, transcribing songs and stories in their language, adding enhanced metadata and generating TK labels to enrich the Library's catalog records and the newly-launched collection website. The discussion focuses on several aspects of the initiative, ranging from control of indigenous intellectual property to digital repatriation to emerging digital technologies to ethical curation and community outreach. In particular, Passamaquoddy community members describe the critical importance of ethnographic field recordings for sustaining cultural memory, preserving native identity and stemming the loss of language. They perform songs learned through listening to the recordings, including the first public performance of a song not heard since its documentation 128 years ago.

Massachusetts

Essex National Heritage Area
Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area (CT, MA)

The 34 cities and towns of Essex County make up the Essex National Historical Area, spanning the North Shore and Merrimack Valley of Eastern Massachusetts. The heritage area includes historic towns such as Salem and the Essex Coastal Scenic Byway.

Joseph Sciorra collection, 1903-2018
Call Number: AFC 2018/065
Collection includes fieldwork and documentation of Sicilian Americans living in Gloucester, Massachusetts

Margot Mayo and American Square Dance Group collection
Call Number: AFC 1975/049
Collection of instantaneous discs of radio broadcasts and test recordings of the American Square Dance Group. Collection includes test recording of Brother Ricardo Belden, a clockmaker at Hancok, MA, Shaker Village, who taught Shaker worship music and dance at the Shaker Village work camp in 1949.

New York

The Champlain Valley National Heritage Area spans the interconnected waterways of Lake Champlain, Lake George, the Champlain Canal and portions of the Upper Hudson River in Vermont and New York. The region is the ancestral homeland of both Algonquin and Iroquoian peoples and has played a vital role in the establishment of the United States and Canada.

Marjorie Lansing Porter collection
Call Number: AFC 1983/034
Collection of field recordings of conversations, stories, life histories, recitations, accounts of boating on Lake Champlain; songs originally recorded in the Adirondack and Lake Champlain regions of New York.

The Erie Canalway National Heritage encompasses New York's Canal system and the communities that grew along its shores. The heritage area stretches across 500 miles of upstate New York. The state's canal system were an important part of America's transportation system and contributed to New York becoming an important commercial and financial hub.

Oral histories of the Erie Canal: Archie Green Fellows Project, 2010-2011
Call Number: AFC 2012/010
Collection of videotaped oral history interviews with workers along the Erie Canal corridor in New York State. Some interviews were used in producing Heartland Passage, an oral history documentary about workers along the route of New York State's Erie Canal.

The Maurice D. Hinchey Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area includes stories from the indigenous people who have lived in the area since time immemorial, as well as the stories of colonists and immigrants who came to region later.

Community Health Workers in Downstate New York: Archie Green Fellows Project, 2021-2022
Call Number: AFC 2021/008
Aaron Paige and Elinor Levy at Arts Westchester, in collaboration with Sun River Health (SRH), interviewed 16 of the non-profit's community health workers in rural, urban and suburban locations in the Hudson River Valley, New York City and Long Island. One of the largest Federally Qualified Health Centers in the country with over 40 locations serving more than 245,000 patients, SRH's community health workers are trained frontline healthcare workers who typically share cultural values, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and life experiences with the communities they serve.

Managed by the Niagara Falls State Park, the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area preserves the history of the falls, the area's inhabitants throughout time, and the region's influence on New York and the rest of the world. Potential areas of interest include the Prophet Isaiah Second Coming House, the Niagara Falls Power Project, and Erie Canal.

The Ransomville Speedway: Dirt Track Racing in Western New York: Archie Green Fellows Project, 2020-2021
Call Number: AFC 2020/013
Collection of 17 oral history interviews documenting workers involved with the legendary Ransomville Speedway, a dirt track founded in 1958 in Ransomville, NY by Ed Ortiz and a group of local raders known as the Ransomville Slo-Pokes. The Speedway remains a family run enterprise, and is a major source of price and regional identity in Niagara County and the wider Buffalo-Niagara region. The collection consists primarily of audio interviews supplemented by documentary photographs.
Oral histories of the Erie Canal : Archie Green Fellows Project, 2010-2011.
Call Number: AFC 2012/010
City Lore, a New York City-based cultural heritage/folklife non-profit organization, was awarded a 2010 Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, to document occupational folklore along the Erie Canalway. Collection of videotaped oral history interviews with workers along the Erie Canal corridor in New York State, conducted by folklorist Jens Lund for City Lore in May 2010 in Buffalo, Seneca Falls, Lockport, Tonawanda, West Seneca, Hamburg, Derby, Cheektowaga, and other locations. Interviewees include tugboat captains and engineers, machinists, knitting mill plant managers, mill workers, steelworkers, metalworkers, union organizers, harbormasters, drydock workers, and locktenders. Some interviews were used in producing Heartland Passage, an oral history documentary about workers along the route of New York State's Erie Canal. The collection includes recording logs and a fieldwork report by Jens Lund.

Rhode Island

John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Area (MA, RI)

Known as the region where the American Industrial Revolution began, the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage area follows the direction of the Blackstone River from Worchester, MA to Providence, RI and includes areas of industry such as textile mills, boatbuilding slips, and sawmills.

Rhode Island Folklife Project collection
Call Number: AFC 1991/022
The Rhode Island Folklife Project collection resulted from a field survey project of the American Folklife Center, conducted in cooperation with the Rhode Island Heritage Commission, the Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and the Rhode Island Historical Society from July 15 to December 31, 1979. many photos highlight occupational culture, including photos of textile mills, sawmills, markets, restaurants, woodworking, boatbuilding, fishing, clamming, gunsmithing, and taxidermy.

There is an online presence for this collection.

Rhode Island folklife resources by prepared by Peter T. Bartis
Call Number: GR110.R4 B37 1983
Published/Created: 1983
Document developed to augment the findings of the Rhode Island Folklife Survey. In 1980, after completion of the fieldwork, a questionnaire was sent to libraries, museums, and societies throughout the state to assemble a preliminary fining and reference list of institutional holdings and resources that may be of interest to cultural researchers.
Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools in America Project collection, 1982-1986
Call Number: AFC 1993/001
The Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools in American 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 survey includes a Ukrainian school in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

There is an online presence for this collection.

Vermont

Champlain Valley National Heritage Area

Margaret MacArthur performs ballads and songs from Vermont, another in the Homegrown 2005 Concert Series sponsored by the American Folklife Center.

Marjorie Lansing Porter collection
Call Number: AFC 1983/034
Collection of field recordings of conversations, stories, life histories, recitations, accounts of boating on Lake Champlain; songs originally recorded in the Adirondack and Lake Champlain regions of New York.

National Heritage Areas: Resources in the American Folklife Center

Northeast

Connecticut

Maine

Massachusetts

New York

Rhode Island

Vermont