Preserving the Stories of America

Musical traditions and recollections of eight retired African-American railroad track laborers whose occupational folk songs were once heard on railroads that crisscross the South.

LaVaughn Robinson, a National Heritage Fellowship award winner, was a tap-dance virtuoso on the big-band circuit in the 1940s and ’50s who became a master teacher and a major force in...

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...

This is My Home Now explores the lives of four youths from three Montagnard immigrant families who have fled their homelands in Southeast Asia to forge a new future in North Carolina. 

In 1948, Robert Flaherty was working on "The Louisiana Story." He was searching for a small boat, or "pirogue" for his young hero. Flaherty soon became aware that pirogue-making was a disappearing...