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Posted by staff on May 09, 2002 at 22:18:39:
Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting"
presents approximately 500 interview excerpts and approximately 3800
photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The four-month
study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in
1994. Paterson is
considered to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America.
It was founded in 1791 by the Society for Establishing Useful
Manufactures (S.U.M.), a group that had U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
Alexander Hamilton as an advocate. The basis for Paterson's
manufacturing potential was the Great Falls on the Passaic River.
Paterson went on to become the largest silk manufacturing center in the
nation as well as a leader in the manufacture of many other products,
from railroad locomotives to firearms. The documentary materials presented in this online collection explore
how this industrial heritage expresses itself in Paterson today: in its
work sites, work processes, and memories of workers. The online
presentation also includes interpretive essays exploring such topics as
work in the African-American community, a distinctive food tradition
(the Hot Texas Wiener), the ethnography of a single work place (Watson
Machine International), business life along a single street in Paterson
(21st
Avenue), and narratives told by retired workers. This collection can be found at the following URL:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wiphtml/ Other folklife-related online collections, selected publications of the
American Folklife Center, and information about its products and
services are available from the Center's homepage:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife The Library of Congress, founded on April 24, 1800, is the nation's
oldest federal cultural institution. It preserves a collection of more
than 19 million items, the large majority in media other than books.
These include the largest map, film, and television collections in the
world. In addition to its primary mission of serving the research needs
of Congress, the Library serves all Americans through its Web site,
which can be found at http://www.loc.gov, and in its twenty-two reading
rooms on Capitol Hill. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress was created by
Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife." The Center
incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established at the
Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music. The Center and
its collections have grown to encompass all aspects of folklife from
this country and around the world. Working in Paterson is part of the American Memory digital library at
the Library of Congress. Its more than 100 collections--which range
from papers of the U.S. presidents, Civil War photographs and early
films of Thomas Edison to papers documenting the women's suffrage and
Civil Rights movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball
cards--include more than 7 million items from the collections of the
Library and those of other major repositories.
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