Prize winning quilt by Nevada quilter Patricia Encarnacion from the online collection Quilts and Quiltmaking in America: 1978-1996. Part of the cultural documentation found in Nevada's Local Legacies projects.

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 Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture [draft available upon request]

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.

• View Nevada's Local Legacies projects

Field Research Projects

• 1978-82 Paradise Valley Folklife Project. [online presentation]
• 1989-91 Italian-Americans in the West Project. [catalog record] [finding aid]

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

• Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Northern Nevada. [catalog record]
• Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian-American Folklife in the West. [catalog record]
• The Ninety-Six: A Cattle Ranch in Northern Nevada. [catalog record] [online presentation]