James Madison Carpenter Collection Project

AFS managed four two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a scholarly edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, a groundbreaking collection of folk music, song, drama, dance, narrative, and children’s folklore documented in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the US between 1927 and 1955.
A team of US and UK scholars, led by Julia Bishop and Ian Russell of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, carried out work on this project in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in whose archives the Carpenter Collection is housed and maintained. The Center’s web site includes a guide and finding aid to the Collection, and a catalogue of the Collection is also available online.
In 2018, a digital version of the AFC’s James Madison Carpenter Collection was launched online in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Online Digital Archive.
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