Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (1941 total)

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Divide the Ring - Jerry Goodwin

In this version of the traditional Cut Off Six / Divide the Ring figure, the active couple turns the others as they stand in a line. Larry Edleman demonstrates this in more detail on the related… View item
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Birdie in the Cage - Jerry Goodwin

Recorded at a square dance on February 7, 1987 at the Prosperity Fire Hall, Washington County, PA.Jerry Goodwin, CallerMountain Express: Chuck Monticello, fiddle Joe Fry, electric guitar Bob Hill,… View item
Website

Contemporary Accounts of Dance From the American West in the Nineteenth Century

Doctoral dissertation based on primary sources; includes a look at dances on the pioneer trails, in logging camps in mining camps, rural social life and urban social life. From the author's… View item
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Emergence and Development of the Cotillon

Jean-Michel Guilcher is a pre-eminent scholar of French dance. This is an excerpt from his book, La contredanse: un tournant dans l'histoire française de la danse, translated for the Square… View item
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Revival Squares - video and web links

Recent years have seen the appearance of a new audience for square dances. One important starting point was a series of dances in the Portland, Oregon, area, led bycaller Bill Martinand the Foghorn… View item
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Seated Square Dance, Janine Smith

Caller Janine Smith (MD) calling a seated (sitting) square dance in a video created during the pandemic lockdown when dancing in person was impossible. Janine got her inspiration for this form of… View item
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Let's Square Dance - instructional films, 1950s

In the mid-1950s, Janet R. MacLean, a professor in the Indiana University Department of Recreation, produced a series of six instructional films to introduce square dancing. The films, each… View item
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Square Dance Contests - Texas debate, 1948

In the 1920s and 1930s, continuing a little into the 1940s, Texas had numerous square dance competitions. These two essays from Foot 'n' Fiddle magazine debate the merits of such events.In the first… View item
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Florilla Perkins Ames, Vermont

Florilla Perkins Ames was 102 years old when she recorded this interview. She lives in northern Vermont, and remembers her father calling dances. Before that, her mother's grandfather used to… View item
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Country Dancing in Central and Western New York State

This overview of different forms of country dancing in upper New York State starts in the early 1800s. The author looks at quadrilles and squares, longways and round dances, "from rural house parties… View item