Preserving the Stories of America

For the past eighty years, believers living in the Appalachian hills of the southeastern US have incorporated handling serpents and drinking strychnine (a “salvation cocktail”) into their...

Nikitas Tsimouris (1924 - 2001) brought the complex music of the tsabouna, a type of Greek bagpipe, to Tarpon Springs. In 1991, Tsimouris became the first Floridian to receive a National Heritage...

With nothing more than her plucky spirit and her pocket knife, a mountain girl outwits a witch and an ogre to save herself and her sisters.

Ralph Fasanella was born on Labor Day, 1914 in New York's Little Italy neighborhood to Joe the Iceman and Ginevre the Buttonhole Maker from Bari, Italy. His rough childhood among impoverished...

Othar Turner, a fife-maker and musician, owns his farm in the Gravel Springs community in northwest Mississippi. The rhythmical music he and his friends play is called "fife and drum." A 1971 film by...