Folklore
Boy and Girl Tramps of America
In 1933 and 1934, Thomas Minehan, a young sociologist at the University of Minnesota, joined the ranks of a roving army of 250,000 boys and girls torn from their homes during the Great Depression. Disguised ...
Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling
What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances ...
Going Up the Country
At the height of the blues revival, Marina Bokelman and David Evans, young graduate students from California, made two trips to Louisiana and Mississippi and short trips in their home state to do fieldwork ...
Webspinner
Born in 1928 in a tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Duncan Williamson (d. 2007) eventually came to be recognized as one of the foremost storytellers in Scotland and the world. Webspinner: Songs, ...
Sexy Like Us
Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality takes a humorous, intimate approach to disability through the stories, jokes, performances, and other creative expressions of people with disabilities. Author ...
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends
In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But ...
Frankenstein Was a Vegetarian
In Frankenstein Was a Vegetarian: Essays on Food Choice, Identity, and Symbolism, Michael Owen Jones tackles topics often overlooked in foodways. At the outset he notes it was Victor Frankenstein’s ...
The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture
Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially ...
Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard
Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. ...
Songs of Earth
Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, ...