Recently added articles from Voices:
From the Director
Oct 01, 2008; ... With this issue we bid a fond good-bye to Faye McMahon, who has been Voices' acquisitions editor for the past five years. Faye has shaped the look and subject mat- ter of the journal, taking the original intent of Voices and enhancing its professionalism and scholarly content. Under Faye's ...
From the Editor
Oct 01, 2008; ... This issue's lead article, Dee Britton's "Com- fort in Cloth: The Syracuse University Remembrance Quilt," documents the cre- ation of a unique folk- art memorial for the thirty-five students at Syracuse University who died with 235 others as the result of a terrorist attack December 21, 1988 ....
A Continuing Education Opportunity
Oct 01, 2008; ... Empire State College-Hartsdale, with the professorial leadership of Cathy Ragland, is teaming up with the New York Folklore Society to offer a series of colloquia: "Folk and Community Arts Organizations: Creating, Producing, and Managing." The colloquia are offered free of charge. The New York ...
NYFS at the New York Library Association
Oct 01, 2008; ... Please visit the New York Folklore Society booth at the New York Library Association conference at City Center in Saratoga Springs ...
Gallery of New York Folk Art
Oct 01, 2008; ... The New York Folklore Society has a year- round gallery shop, offering a consignment sales opportunity for folk artists within the state. Sales are available in person at 133 Jay Street, Schenectady, and on our web site, www.nyfolklore.org ....
Comfort in Cloth: The Syracuse University Remembrance Quilt
Oct 01, 2008; ... On the evening of December 21,1 988, Pan American Flight 103 flew into the winter solstice skies over London's Heathrow airport as it began the final leg of a journey that originated in Frankfurt and was to conclude at New York's JFK airport. The plane carried 259 people; in addition, its cargo ...
Elena Martínez
Oct 01, 2008; ... For Elena Martinez, folklorist at City Lore in Manhattan, it's been a good year. Fellow folklorists Hanna Griff-Sleven and Jean Crandall made this observation as they nominated Elena to be profiled in this issue's "In Praise of Women." Last summer, the dance documentary Elena produced with City ...
Hallowed Ground
Oct 01, 2008; ... There are no prescribed rituals for mourning thousands of people. We invented them as we went along. With a couple of candles and a bunch of flowers we transformed ordinary sidewalks and street corners into sacred spaces. Here friends, family, or passersby could pause to pray, reflect on the ...
Ritual and Storytelling: A Passover Tale
Oct 01, 2008; ... I was privileged to meet anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff on two occasions prior to her untimely death at the age of fifty in 1985. The first was when my wife, Amanda, and I invited both Myerhoff and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to a consultants' meeting at our Washington, D.C., apartment for a ...
That Dastardly Dime Novel
Oct 01, 2008; ... "Touch but a hair of her head, and by the Lord that made me, I will bespatter that tree with your brains!" This is from page ten of the first dime novel, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. It was not long before such chilling propositions would become the first words on page ...
A Trip to Poppies
Oct 01, 2008; ... During my spring semester at Syracuse University I completed fieldwork for the public folklore course Folk Arts, Festival, and Public Display offered at Syracuse University through the Soling and honors programs. A part of my final project was a visit to Poppies, a community-operated folk arts ...
Filer-Machol: Couturier to "Our Crowd"
Oct 01, 2008; ... Today, 747 Madison Avenue, between 64th and 65th streets in the heart of Manhattan's luxury shopping district, is the home of the uber-elegant Italian boutique Valentino. The 747 Madison I remember was a slightly dingy brownstone where two floors housed Filer-Machol, a specialty shop that ...
New Immigrants in Black Buggies
Oct 01, 2008; ... If you believed some of the talking heads on cable television or talk radio the last couple of years, it's been the "immigration problem" that is leading to the downfall of our American way of life, and something has to be done about it! Lou Dobbs and FOXN ews rail against "the government" for ...
City of Memory
Oct 01, 2008; ... The memory map of Manhattan was twenty feet long. The Bronx and Brooklyn were small in comparison. Staten Island was only two feet wide. We hauled it all down to Washington in a pickup truck and mounted the styrofoam maps on a chain link fence at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. We tracked ...
Meet Our Neighbors: The Nepali People of Bhutan
Oct 01, 2008; ... As a public sector folklorist and research professor in anthropology at Syracuse University, my fieldwork frequently brings me in contact with newly arrived immigrants to central New York. The newest ethnic group to arrive in Syracuse are the Nepali people of Bhutan who arrived in our city this ...
Houses of Horror
Oct 01, 2008; ... Those of us who enjoy watching scary movies know that a certain kind of haunted house epitomizes horror. In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, for example, the eerie, ornate mansion possessed by children's spirits seems to cause the central character's death. Even larger and stranger ...
Diatonisk and the Dulcimer
Oct 01, 2008; ... My search for the psalmodikon and the origin of the fretted dulcimer began in New York's Saratoga County in the late 1960s. I used to hitch hike to Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, where I first saw and heard the fretted dulcimer. A defining moment in my search came many years later, during a ...
Pioneering Ethnomusicologist: Henrietta Yurchenco, 1916 to 2007
Oct 01, 2008; ... New York's folk arts community joins the world in mourning the passing of pioneering ethnomusicologist, radio broadcaster, and educator Henrietta Yurchenco, who died at ninety-one in Manhattan in December 2007. Yurchenco left behind a large legacy of publications on folk music and musicians, ...
Schooner Captain
Oct 01, 2008; ... By all logic, the skills needed to manage a large sailing vessel shouldn't have any place in contemporary New York City. The days when the southern tip of Manhattan resembled a forest of masts and spars are long gone. Even though the commercial era of the Port of New York has waned, however, ...
No Egg, No Cream
Oct 01, 2008; ... My husband and I recently made a pilgrimage to New York City to taste an egg cream. When I told her our plans, one of my friends said, "Only you would travel eight hours to taste a soda." Maybe so, but for loyal fans of the egg cream, that simple soda has all the evocative potential of Proust's ...