What About Delia?

Delia Zapata Olivella, daughter, mother, sister, friend, bruja…. She was an Afro-Colombian woman born in 1926 in Santa Cruz de Lorica and lived her childhood in Cartagena, Colombia. Delia Zapata Olivella was a renowned dancer, artist, teacher, activist,...

The Black Diaspora Quilt History Project

Numerous people have acknowledged the importance of quiltmaking within the African American experience. Zora Neale Hurston, who closely examined Black vernacular cultural traditions, included references to quilts in her folklore-infused writing. Alice Walker (1973)...

A Future from the Past

The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, houses the works of the ethnomusicologist Frances Theresa Densmore, including a collection of more than 2,500 American Indian songs she recorded between 1907 and 1941. Approximately 260 of Densmore’s cataloged...

The Local Learning Teaching with Folk Sources Team answers

Primary sources force us to complicate what we accept as the full story. Alexandra S. Antohin, Journal of Folklore and Education Guest Editor Primary sources allow us to think of documentation as beyond the reporting of information and repetition of established...

“An Electromagnetic Tenderness of Remembering”

This interview engages with how one folklorist’s interests in recording spoken sounds and memories of his grandmother opened a pathway to recording the memories and sounds of living descendants of traditional Appalachian balladry. Through the processes of engaging...