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What is Folklore?
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales, stories, tall tales, and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group.
Resources
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)Use to access the digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century in the United Kingdom. Among the subjects covered are history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, and science. Click here to search this database with other primary source databases.
- Project GutenburgDatabase providing access to historic folk tales and public domain books from a variety of cultures.
- International Children's Digital LibraryThe library includes original stories and tales from around the world and translated from their original languages.
- Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA)Archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric available in their original formats. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship.
- Tennessee Myths & LegendsThe webpage contains images of primary sources related to myths and tales that are then described in detail or are seen next to the corresponding legend.
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How to Find More Use the following keywords in a UT Collections search to find folktales in books: "fairy tales", "haunted places", legends, myths, tales, witchcraft. Folktales are often classified by motifs and types. Similar motifs and tales are often told among many different cultures. Find more information about the Aarne-Thompson classificatiion here:
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- American Folklife Center Online CollectionsThere are items of ethnographic documentation, over a hundred years of fieldwork preserving a record of the folklife, cultural expressions, traditional arts, and oral histories of Americans and of our global neighbors from the end of the nineteenth century through to the twenty-first.
- American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940Result of the Federal Writer's Project from the New Deal Program attempting to chronicle the historic life stories of individuals living during the Great Depression. The collection consists of various folk stories relating to historic events and characters such as Western outlaws and the 1871 Chicago Fire.
- Blue Ridge Harvest (PDF)A book of photos and descriptions that provide a look into the region's lifestyle of individuals within the culture in 1978, including religious practices, fox-hunting, dancing, and farming.
- Appalachian Libraries and ArchivesAppalachian Studies Association’s (ASA) list of academic research centers, libraries, museums, and archives manuscript collections for researching Appalachia.
- Documenting the American SouthA digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. It includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.