Contemporary Art Quilting
This is a lecture that addresses the history of art quilts with images and explanations that take quilts off beds and onto walls and as sculptural artworks.
Topic Category: Folklore
Writing Family History Book Series: The Narrative History Approach
Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a story-based form. It tends to entail writing based on reconstructing a series of short-term events about individuals or specific events in a broader context. Learn about how to write a narrative history about your relatives and the process in writing your family history book using … Read more
Writing Family History Book Series: The Narrative Inquiry Approach
A narrative is a story or an account. While there is no mainstream research design in family history, narrative inquiry is a research method that uses narratives as units of analysis to contextualize and interpret to create meaning. Learn about how to incorporate narrative inquiry to research and write your family history book. Examples from … Read more
Jack Tales from the Richard Chase Collection
In 1983, while working as a scholar-in-residence for the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities, Dr. Williams had the opportunity to travel around the mountains with Richard Chase, the famous Jack Tale collector. During that time, he discussed Chase’s dialect renditions of the Jack Tales along with a number of old English fairy tales which Chase discovered … Read more
How To Collect Your Community Stories
This presentation focuses on Oral History and its value to a community. Dr. Williams will share stories from two projects which he directed: the Appalachian Oral History Project and the Great Smoky Mountains Project. In the late 1970s Dr. Williams was one of the campus directors for an oral history project which covered four states … Read more
Legends and Ghost Stories from the South
The South has a rich tradition of folk literature that draws upon oral tradition and colorful language for its substance. Legends, folk history, songs, foodways, customs, and unique dialects permeate the ghost stories of South Carolina and other Southern states. Dr. Williams draws upon the numerous collections of ghost stories and scary tales to create … Read more
Tales From the Mill Villages
The Folklore and oral traditions from the mill villages are rapidly changing as the they go the way of the coal camps in the mountains. Storytelling itself, the connective tissue of the community, has been drastically affected by this change. Dr. Williams has collected stories from mill workers in the Upstate, and he weaves a … Read more
Stories From Our Mountain Heritage
An entertaining storyteller, Dr. Williams portrays the characters from folk tales collected from Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, Ohio. He highlights the migrants’ deep-seated sense of place as he recreates characters in Appalachian dialect. Especially moving is his version of Cinderella as a poor girl living up a hollar in the Kentucky mountains whose painted fingernails … Read more
Silas Butts: The Legacy of a Moonshiner
This lecture looks at the interesting concept of history vs. memory using the microhistory of one man’s legacy. Silas Butts was a moonshiner in Oconee County who also ran a grist mill and an unofficial orphanage. But people remember him differently- either as a great man or a horrible man. How can one person have … Read more
