This series contains audio recordings of special events and everyday activities at the Downtown Community School and Camp Woodland. The Department digitized hundreds of reel-to-reel audio recordings to date.
The Downtown Community School audio recordings document guest speakers, student discussions and readings, school plays, intergroup conferences, lectures, staff meetings, musical performances, school trips, oral histories and other programs. Highlights of the subseries include recordings about race relations and the boycott that took place at the Lincoln School in Englewood, NJ in February 1963 and a visit to the school from Red Thunder Cloud, last Indigenous speaker of the Catawba language. Not all recordings are identified or dated.
The Camp Woodland audio recordings may be one of the more significant components of the collection. While at Camp Woodland, Norman Studer recorded numerous oral histories of many of the indigenous Catskill residents as well as the annual Folk Festival of the Catskills. Studer was acutely aware that he was in a position to capture the ethnographic folk culture, music, and ecology of a fading era. In many instances, the tapes represent the only extant recordings and variations of a number of songs.
This series contains all Norman Studer's writings from diaries to published articles, including posthumous reprints. There also are works co-written with others or background materials authored by other individuals, such as Camp Woodland campers. The series is sub-divided into Studer's writing and his diaries and travelogues.
This subseries contains manuscript and typescript drafts, typescripts, notes, reprints, monographs, and a small amount of correspondence related to Studer's writing projects. Of interest are two typescript drafts of unpublished projects: Community Life and Woodland Story both of which are reflective pieces examining Studer's life and work at the Downtown Community School and Camp Woodland respectively. Please note that Studer published some Woodland Story chapters separately. For instance, "Folklore from a Valley that Died" (Chapter 9) was a standalone article in New York Folklore Quarterly in 1956. The standalone article "Yarns of a Catskill Woodsman" (Chapter 16) appeared in New York Folklore Quarterly in 1955. "Mike Todd's Story" (Chapter 11) later evolved into and was published as A Catskill Woodsman. A draft of Woodland Story's Chapter 17 entitled "Our Catskill Teachers" also appears as a section of a draft of Chapter 3. Therefore draft text is found in both files. This collection is missing later draft chapters of Woodland Story so there are gaps in the order.