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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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