City Folk: Pinewoods Camp and English Country Dance in America

City Folk: Pinewoods Camp and English Country Dance in America.

"City Folk" is a 50 minute video which I am producing in collaboration with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  Based on the research for my book with the same title, this is an historical ethnography of a revivalist community of white, affluent Americans who engage in a recreational Anglo-American folk dance practice.  The film situates the community in its transAtlantic exchanges and seeks to provide a window on the political culture of twentieth-century liberalism.   The program illustrates some of the challenges translating complex scholarly arguments into film and melding the different discursive traditions of folklorists and historians.  

Daniel Walkowitz is a social and cultural historian who in nearly a dozen books, many articles and three films for public television has worked to bring America’s past to both academic and broad public audiences.  Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Professor of History at New York University, from 1989 to 2004, he Directed the Metropolitan Studies Program, from 2004-07 served as the Colleges’ inaugural Director of College Honors., and from 2007-10 served as the College’s inaugural Director of Experiential Education.   As co-founder and co-Director of New York University's Graduate Program in Public History, Walkowitz pioneered efforts to bring America's past to broad general audiences in film and video.