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Nevada
The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress through Public Law 94-201 and charged to "preserve and present American folklife." The Center incorporates the Archive
of Folk Culture, which was established at the Library of Congress in 1928, and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world.
Collections
The collections of the American Folklife Center contain rich and varied
materials from Nevada that document the state's diverse folk traditions.
Among its unique recordings are Ute, Northern Paiute, Washoe, and other
Native American music recordings made by Omer Stewart in 1938 and Willard
Rhodes in 1949; cowboy songs and stories by Jack H. "Powder River" Lee
of Virginia City, 1942; oral histories and stories of traditional life
made by Duncan Emrich, 1950; and Basque radio broadcasts from Station KELK
in Elko, from the 1970s.
Between 1978 and 1982, the Center conducted the Paradise Valley Folklife
Project to document and analyze the traditional life and work of a ranching
community in Nevada (the project was developed in conjunction with the
Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Arts). Documentary materials from the project include fieldnotes; sound, motion
picture, and video recordings; and 30,000 black-and-white negatives and
color transparencies. The project also resulted in a book, Buckaroos
in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Northern Nevada [catalog record], an exhibit of the same
name at the Smithsonian Institution [catalog record], a videodisc, The Ninety- Six:
A Cattle Ranch in Northern Nevada [catalog record], and an American Memory online presentation, Buckaroos
in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-82.
From 1989 to 1991, the Center conducted a field research project documenting
the culture and traditions of Italian-Americans in the West, which culminated
in a traveling exhibition and companion book of essays. The documentary
material created during the project includes recordings, photographs, architectural
drawings, and other documents from ranching and mining communities from
Eastern and Central Nevada.
Nevada participated in the Library's Bicentennial Local Legacies project,
which includes documentation of local traditions and celebrations for the
American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture.
Field Research Projects
Public Programs
- 1980 Buckaroos in Paradise (exhibit), Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.
- 1980 A meeting of state folklorists and folk arts coordinators at
the Library of Congress provided the setting for discussions the led
to what
has become one of the most successful folk arts programs in the country,
the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, sponsored by the
Western Folklife Center.
- 1992-93 Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian-American in the West (exhibit),
Reno.
Publications
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