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Chinese opera master artist Kuang-yu Fong, 1996.
Chinese opera master artist Kuang-yu Fong, 1996. Photo by Stephen Latimer. Part of the "Middlesex County Cultural Heritage Commission's Folklife Program for New Jersey," one of New Jersey's Local Legacies projects.

New Jersey

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 material from New Jersey that documents the state's diverse folk traditions. Among its unique recordings are hundreds of ballads, Irish fiddle tunes, gospel songs, Yiddish, and Lithuanian folksongs. In 1983, the Center conducted the Pinelands Folklife Project, documenting the traditions of the region in and around the Pinelands State Forest, including vernacular fox hunting practices, family gatherings, and the traditional ways people in the area interact with their natural environment. In addition to the publication One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey's Pinelands National Reserve [catalog record], the project also produced hundreds of hours of audio-tape interviews, thousands of photographic images and many pages of transcriptions. This documentary material has been incorporated into the collections of the Folklife Center.

The online presentation Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting includes 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in 1994. The documentary materials presented in this online collection explore how this industrial heritage expresses itself in Paterson today: in its work sites, work processes, and memories of workers. This is an American Memory Presentation.

In 2004, the Center acquired a large collection of sound recordings of New Jersey folksongs and narratives, with accompanying photographs, made by folklorist Herbert Halpert from the 1930s to the 1950s.

  • New Jersey Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture [full text]

New Jersey 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

Publications

  • One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey's Pinelands National Reserve. [catalog record]
  • New Jersey Folklife Resources.
  • "The Origin of Pineys: Local Historians and the Legend," Folklife Annual 1985. [catalog record]
  • "Culture and Cultivation of Nature: The Pinelands National Reserve," Folklife Annual 1985. [catalog record]
  • "Soundscape and Story: Foxhunting in New Jersey's Pine Barrens," Folklife Annual 88-89. [catalog record]
  • Cranberries.
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  December 2, 2008
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