News From Library of Congress: “COVID Recollections: Now Available – First Collection of Frontline Worker Interviews from the COVID-19 American History Project”

From The Library of Congress:

The American Folklife Center is proud to announce that the first collection of interviews documented for the COVID-19 American History Project is now available online. To view these materials, visit the COVID-19 American History Project collection on the website of the Library of Congress. The collection features twenty interviews with service and hospitality workers in New Orleans, Louisiana, collected from October to December 2023. The interviews, documented by Dismantle Media and Culture Alliance, detail frontline workers’ experiences with the COVID-19 and the changes they navigated in their personal lives because of the pandemic. In the coming months, approximately 50 additional interviews with child care workers in Appalachia and funeral professionals in various parts of the United States, documented by Nicole Musgrave and Gran Enterprises respectively, will be added to this online collection.

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“The interviews we’ve collected through the COVID-19 American History Project represent communities of frontline workers who have made crucial contributions to American society during the pandemic, but went largely unnoticed by traditional media outlets,” says Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center. “These interviews not only give us a broader understanding of working Americans’ lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic but will serve as important historical documentation for future generations.”

The online publication of these twenty interviews represents a significant milestone in the COVID-19 American History Project. Mandated by an act of Congress in 2023, the COVID-19 American History Project is an initiative to collect and make available pandemic oral histories from frontline workers and other Americans affected by COVID-19. To meet this directive, the American Folklife Center has created a website (with StoryCorps), called the COVID-19 Archive Activation page

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Direct to COVID-19 American History Project Collection

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