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Alan Dundes (September 8, 1934 – March 30, 2005)^[1] was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more.^[2] One of his most notable articles was called "Seeing is Believing" in which he indicated that Americans value the sense of sight more than the other senses.

Career[link]

Dundes attended Yale University, where he studied English^[1] and met his wife Carolyn. Sure that he would be drafted upon completion of his studies, Dundes joined the ROTC and trained to become a naval communications officer. When it turned out that the ship he was to be posted to, stationed in the Bay of Naples, already had a communications officer, Dundes asked what else that ship might need, not wanting to give up such a choice assignment. He then spent two years maintaining artillery guns on a ship in the Mediterranean. Upon completion of his service, Dundes attended Indiana University to pursue a Ph.D in folklore.^[1] He quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the field of folkloristics. He completed his degree very quickly and went on to a teaching position at the University of Kansas where he stayed for only a year before being offered a place in the University of California, Berkeley anthropology department teaching folklore. Dundes held this position for 42 years, until his death in 2005.

Teaching methods[link]

Alan Dundes was an engaging lecturer, his Introduction to Folklore course attracting upwards of 400 students in some years.^{[citation needed]} In this course, students were introduced to the many various forms of folklore, from myth, legend, and folktale to proverbs and riddles to jokes, games, and folkspeech (slang), to folk belief and foodways. The final project for this course required that each student collect, identify, and analyze 40 items of folklore. All of this material (about 500,000 items) is housed and cataloged in the Berkeley Folklore Archives. Dundes also taught undergraduate courses in American folklore, and psychoanalytic approaches to folklore (his favorite approach) in addition to graduate seminars on the history of folkloristics, from an international perspective, and the history and progression of folklore theory.

Dundes was also a great supporter of the New Student Orientation Program at UC Berkeley(CalSO). He frequently gave the opening address during summer orientation programs, whetting students' appetites about the type of instruction they might receive at the University. These addresses were littered with jokes and stories which were a trademark of Dundes' lectures in his popular anthropology class and were a favorite of both in-coming students and the orientation staff alike.^{[citation needed]}

Controversy[link]

Strongly opinionated, Dundes was not at all averse to the controversy that his theories often generated. He dealt frequently with folklore as an expression of unconscious desires and anxieties and was of the opinion that if people reacted strongly to what he had to say, he had probably hit a nerve and was probably on to something. Some of his more controversial work involved examining the New Testament and the Qur'an as folklore.^[3] However, of all his articles, the one that earned him death threats was "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown" an exploration of the homoerotic subtext inherent in the terminology and rituals surrounding American football.^[4] In 1980, Dundes was invited to give the presidential address at the American Folklore Society annual meeting.^[5] His presentation, later published as a monography titled "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder", uses folkspeech, customs, material culture, and so forth seeking to demonstrate an anal-erotic fixation of German national character.^[4] Reaction to this paper was incredibly strong^[4] and because of it, Dundes declined to attend the AFS annual meeting for the next 20 years^{[citation needed]}. When he finally did attend again, in 2004, he again gave a plenary address, this time taking his fellow folklorists to task for being weak on theory. In his opinion, the presentation of data, no matter how thorough, is useless without the development and application of theory to that data. It is not enough to simply collect, one must do something with what one has collected.^[6] In 2012, linguist Anatol Stefanowitsch credited Dundes with having giving rise to a still prevalent "stereotype about Germany as a culture enarmored with excretion", but called his monograph "unstructured, poorly argued and flimsily sourced" and "methodologically flawed because he only looked for evidence supporting his theory, and not – as even a folklorist should – for evidence against his theory".^[7]

Endowment of a professorship[link]

Dundes fiercely defended the importance of the discipline of folkloristics throughout his career. Towards the end of his life, he received a check from a former student, whom he asked his wife to open. She read the figure out as $1,000. In fact, the check was for $1,000,000. This money allowed Dundes to endow the university with a Distinguished Professorship in Folkloristics, thereby ensuring that upon his retirement folklore would not be abandoned in the department.^[8]

The former student and benefactor wished to remain anonymous. Apparently he called the university prior to the donation to find out if Dundes was still teaching, or as Dundes told it, "to see if I was still alive." The student mentioned that he intended to send a check, but Dundes said he was not sure the student would follow through.

The check was made out to the university, Dundes said, but with instructions that he could use it in any manner he saw fit.

"I could just take all my students to Fiji and have one hell of a party," he said.

The professor instead decided to invest it in the study of folklore. The money funds a Distinguished Professorship of Folkloristics and helps fund the university's folklore archives and provides grants for folklore students.^[9]

Interview by Flemming[link]

Shortly before his death, Dundes was interviewed by filmmaker Brian Flemming for his documentary, The God Who Wasn't There. He prominently recounted Lord Raglan's 22-point scale from his 1936 book The Hero, in which he ranks figures possessing similar divine attributions.^[10] An extended interview^[11] is on the DVD version of the documentary.

Death[link]

Dundes collapsed and died while giving a graduate seminar.^[2]

Works[link]

• Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author). Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing.
• (1964)."The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales".
• (Ed.) (1965). The Study of Folklore.
• (1968). "The Number Three in American Culture." In Alan Dundes (ed.), Every Man His Way: Readings in Cultural Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
• (1969). "Thinking Ahead: A Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American Worldview".
• (1971). "A Study of Ethnic Slurs".
• (1972). "Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview".
• (1975). "Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of Ethnicity and National Character".
• (1980). Interpreting Folklore. Indiana University Press.
• (1984). Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore.
• (Ed.) (1984). Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. University of California Press.
• (with C. Banc) (1986) "First Prize: Fifteen Years. An Annotated Collection of Political Jokes" ISBN 0-8386-3245-9
• (1987). Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles & Stereotypes. Ten Speed Press.
• Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author) (1987). When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators...: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Wayne State University Press.
• (Ed.) (1989). Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
• (Ed.) (1990). In Quest of the Hero. Princeton University Press.
• (Ed.) (1991). Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. University Press of Mississippi.
• (1991) The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. University of Wisconsin Press
• (Ed.) (1992). The Evil Eye: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author). (1992) Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore From the Paperwork Empire. ISBN-13 978-0814324325
• (1993). Folklore Matters. University of Tennessee Press.
• (Ed.) (1994). The Cockfight: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Edmunds, Lowell (Co-ed.) (1995). Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Pagter, Carl R. (Co-Author) (1996). Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse University Press.
• (Ed.) (1996). The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
• (1997). From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore. University of Kentucky Press.
• (1997). Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability. Rowman & Littlefield.
• (Ed.) (1998). The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
• Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author) (2000). Why Don't Sheep Shrink When It Rains?: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore. Syracuse University Press.
• (1999). Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
• (2002). Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. University Press of Mississippi.
• (2003). The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges. Rowman & Littlefield.
• (2003). Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur'an. Rowman & Littlefield.
• (2003). Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist. The University of Wisconsin Press.
• (2004). "As the Crow Flies: A Straightforward Study of Lineal Worldview in American Folk Speech".
• (Ed.) (2005). Recollecting Freud. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c} Fox, Margalit (2005-04-02). "Alan Dundes, 70, Folklorist Who Studied Human Custom, Dies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/obituaries/02dundes.html?_r=1&ex=1113109200&en=2efea55ea817dd64&ei=5070&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Burress, Charles (2005-04-02). "UC folklorist Dundes dies while teaching; His scholarship helped to create an academic discipline". San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/01/BAGLHC1NOC1.DTL. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
3. ^ Mieder, Wolfgang (2006). ""The Proof Of The Proverb Is In The Probing": Alan Dundes as Pioneering Paremiologist". Western Folklore (Summer 2006): pages 26–27. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3732/is_200607/ai_n19431119/pg_27. Retrieved 2008-10-31. ^{[dead link]}
4. ^ ^{a b c} Oliver, Myrna (2005-04-03). "Alan Dundes, 70; Folklorist Drew Laughs and Hostility". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/03/local/me-dundes3. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
5. ^ Dundes, Alan. "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder", ISBN 0-8143-2038-4. Preface, p.vii: "An earlier version of this essay was presented in October, 1980 as the presidential address of the American Folklore Society at its annual meeting in Pittsburgh."
6. ^ The transcript of the speech was published in the Fall 2005 issue of the Journal of American Folklore (Vol. 118, No. 470).
7. ^ Stefanowitsch, Anatol (2012-03-02). No Shit!
8. ^ Hunter, D. Lyn (2000-04-19-). "Professor Receives Unexpected Windfall From Former Student". Berkleyan. http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2000/04/19/windfall.html. Retrieved 2009-08-26. 
9. ^ Evans, Will (2000-05-05-). "Million-dollar Teacher Awarded With Big Bucks". Daily Californian. http://www.dailycal.org/printable.php?id=2504. Retrieved 2010-03-07. 
10. ^ Default page – Interview by Fleming [unverified]
11. ^ Movie format (.mov) – Interview by Fleming [unverified]

External links[link]

• "Alan Dundes, UC Berkeley professor and world expert in folklore studies, dies". American Folklore Society. http://www.afsnet.org/aboutfolklore/DundesObituaries.cfm. Retrieved 2008-10-31. ^{[dead link]}
• Burress, Charles (2005-04-02). "UC folklorist Dundes dies while teaching; His scholarship helped to create an academic discipline". San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/01/BAGLHC1NOC1.DTL. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
• Fox, Margalit (2005-04-02). "Alan Dundes, 70, Folklorist Who Studied Human Custom, Dies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/obituaries/02dundes.html?_r=1&ex=1113109200&en=2efea55ea817dd64&ei=5070&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
• Mieder, Wolfgang (2006). ""The Proof Of The Proverb Is In The Probing": Alan Dundes as Pioneering Paremiologist". Western Folklore (Summer 2006). http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3732/is_200607/ai_n19431119/pg_1. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 
• Oliver, Myrna (2005-04-03). "Alan Dundes, 70; Folklorist Drew Laughs and Hostility". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/03/local/me-dundes3. Retrieved 2008-10-31. 

Bess Lomax Hawes (January 21, 1921 – November 27, 2009) was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax.

Early life and education[link]

Born in Austin, Texas, Bess grew up learning folk music from a very early age, since her father, a former English professor and twice president of the American Folklore Society, was Honorary Curator of American folk song at the Library of Congress from 1935-48. As a child, she excelled at classical piano, under the tutelage of her mother, and later she learned to play the guitar.

She entered the University of Texas at fifteen and the following year assisted her father John A., her brother Alan Lomax, and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger with their book, Our Singing Country (1941). She graduated from Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia with a degree in sociology. Later, in the 1960s, she was among the first group of students to receive an M.A. in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of professor Alan Dundes.

Career in music and folk arts[link]

In the early 1940s she moved to New York City, where she was active on the folk scene. She was an on-and-off member of the Almanac Singers; she and a fellow Almanac singer, Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, an artist, were married in 1942.^[1] Another Almanac member, Woody Guthrie, taught her mandolin.

During World War II Bess Lomax Hawes worked for the Office of War Information preparing radio broadcasts for troops overseas. After the end of the war, she and her family moved to Boston; while there she wrote songs for Walter A. O'Brien's 1949 mayoral campaign including "M.T.A.," co-written with Jacqueline Steiner. The song became a hit for the Kingston Trio in 1959. While her children (Nicholas Hawes, Corey Hawes Denos, and Naomi Hawes Bishop) were attending a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard:

She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called “a whole evening.” She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she’d donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.

That was how Bess developed her technique for teaching guitar to large groups of people simultaneously, a method for which she became well-known, and which accounts for the fact that over the years, especially after she moved to Los Angeles in 1951, she was able to teach so many people to play guitar. Many of her students, in turn, became guitar teachers, spreading her method - and her enthusiasm for music - which helped catalyze the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Bess figured . . . "students learning guitar individually can get intimidated because they can hear their own mistakes. In a group, the students feel bolder about playing, take more risks, enjoy it more, and feel part of something bigger, which sounds better, anyway." Peter Dreier, "Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes", Huffington Post, Nov. 30, 2009.

In the 1950s she moved to California, where she taught guitar, banjo, mandolin and folk singing through UCLA Extension courses, at the Idyllwild summer arts program and, starting in 1963, at San Fernando Valley State College. She also played at local clubs as well as at some of the larger folk festivals such as the Newport Folk Festival and the Berkeley Folk Festival.

In 1968 she became Associate Professor of Anthropology at San Fernando Valley State College and later head of the Anthropology Department at what is now Cal State Northridge. Her husband, Butch Hawes, died in 1971.

At California State University Northridge Hawes compiled an extensive archive of folk songs that were gathered by student of hers in Los Angeles and abroad. The archive remains in a private sector of the library, with very limited access.

In 1975, Hawes accepted a position in administration at the Smithsonian Institution, where she was instrumental in organizing the Smithsonian's 1976 Bicentennial Festival of Traditional Folk Arts on the National Mall. In 1977, she was named first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and created the National Heritage Fellowships, which recognize traditional artists and performers. During her tenure, funding for folks arts rose from about $100,000 to $4 million, and 50 state or territorial folk arts programs were set up:

"We're really honoring traditions," Mrs. Hawes told The Washington Post in 1983. "These individuals are the people who've been pushed up by the traditions, they're the lightning rods that we grab onto. It's extremely important for the psychic health and well-being of Americans to maintain all of these little regional distinctions, to establish a cultural pluralism. It's like my brother folklorist Alan Lomax wrote one time: if the cultural gray-out continues around the world, pretty soon there will be no place worth visiting . . . and no particular reason to stay home, either." Patricia Sullivan, "Bess Lomax Hawes, 88, Championed folk arts as performer and NEA official".

She retired in 1992.

Bess Lomax Hawes was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina and the National Medal of Arts awarded in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. An NEA traditional arts award is named in her honor.

Her memoir, Sing It Pretty, was published by Illinois University Press in 2008.

She died in November 2009, aged 88, following a stroke.^[2]

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Hawes, Bess Lomax. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. University of Georgia Press, 1987.
• Hawes, Bess Lomax. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Children's games from the Caribbean.
• Hawes, Bess Lomax. Sing It Pretty: A Memoir (Music in American Life). University of Illinois Press. 2008.

Films[link]

• The Films of Bess Lomax Hawes Four films made at San Fernando Valley State (1964–1970)(now California State University Northridge): Georgia Sea island Singers, Buckdancer, Pizza Pizza Daddy-O, and Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle.

Internet Resources[link]

• Bess Lomax Hawes. Smithsonian Folklife Center.
• Dreier, Peter. "Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes". Huffington Post, November 30, 2009.
• Dreier, Peter, and Jim Vrabel. "Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie & the MTA". Dissent, Spring, 2008.
• Dreier, Peter, and Jim Vrabel. "Will Charlie Ever Get Off That Train? The true story of the Ballad of the MTA". Huffington Post, February 15, 2009.
• Bess Lomax Hawes at Allmusic
• Bess Lomax Hawes at the Internet Movie Database

John Joseph Loftus (February 12, 1950, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American author, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. He is a president of The Intelligence Summit and, although he is not Jewish, a president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. Loftus also serves on the Board of Advisers to Public Information Research. He currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Early career[link]

Son of a Boston firefighter, Loftus is a graduate of Boston College (BA, 1971) and Suffolk University (JD, 1977). ^[1] He served in the U.S. Army from 1971 to 1974, attaining the rank of First Lieutenant. He began working for the US Department of Justice in 1977 and in 1979 joined their Office of Special Investigations, which was charged with prosecuting and deporting Nazi war criminals in the US. Loftus' now-expired Web site claimed, "As a young U.S. Army officer, John Loftus helped train Israelis on a covert operation that turned the tide of battle in the 1973 Yom Kippur War."^[2]

Author[link]

Loftus is the author and co-author of several controversial books on Nazis, espionage, and similar topics including The Belarus Secret (1982), Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (1992), The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (1994), Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks (1998). Although Loftus' first book, The Belarus Secret, is nonfiction, it was adapted into a TV-film, Kojak: The Belarus File (1985), with Telly Savalas. ^[3]

Radio talk show host[link]

Loftus has a radio show on Talkline Communications Network broadcast live every Monday and Tuesday from 11 pm to midnight EST in New York City, northern New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and Miami and Pompano Beach, Florida. His co-host is John Batchelor.^[4]

Social critic[link]

Loftus serves as a media commentator, appearing regularly on ABC National Radio and Fox News.

On August 7, 2005, he provided the United States address of an alleged terrorist named Iyad K. Hilal on Fox News. Only afterwards was it revealed that Hilal had left the address three years previously and the home was now owned by a family, which was then subjected to threats and vandalism and required police protection as a result of Loftus' words.^[5] Fox terminated Loftus's contract to commentate after the event.^[6] Loftus said "I thought it might help police in that area now that we have positively identified a terrorist," but he did not say why he did not contact police in a more direct manner. Loftus apologized for the mistake and expressed frustration about "one federal [agencies]" inaction on an earlier tip he had given them years ago due to the same address.^[7]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Intelligence Summit
• Unofficial Audio Archive of The John Batchelor Show and The Loftus Report commenced February 18, 2008
• Muslim Brotherhood,(Bana) Nazis And Al Qaeda