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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 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.
The highlighted blog posts below focus on the topics of “narrative and verbal arts.”
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
America Works Podcast SeriesThe selected podcasts below focus on the topics of narrative and verbal arts in the American Folklife Center collections.
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.
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.
Linda Goss discusses family storytelling traditions and describes her ongoing research, including African-American family stories on a Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund award from the American Folklife Center, as part of the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series sponsored by the AFC. Linda Goss was honored with a National Heritage Fellowship in 2019. (Event date: June 29, 2006)
Kiran Singh Sirah discusses the power and artistry of storytelling as an ancient art form and as the world's oldest form of communication. He also discusses what he describes as one of the greatest community-building tools that we can use to foster, cultivate and strengthen peace and collaboration in our communities, and will also explore how we might collectively use new storytelling forms in the arenas of peace and community development to help establish a conflict-free world. (Event date: May 25, 2016)
