Dorothy Howard: Pioneer Collector of Children's Folklore

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Sylvia Ann Grider

Abstract

Everyone interested in children's folklore, especially games, owes a debt to Dorothy Mills Howard. Her work bridges the gap between the late nineteenth-century collecting of children's games and the current generation of scholars engaged in serious and systematic childlore research, epitomized by Iona and the late Peter Opie, recognized today as the world's leading collectors of children's folklore.l In 1938 Dorothy Howard's New York University doctoral dissertation, "Folk Jingles of American Children: A Collection of Rhymes Used by Children Today," was heralded as pioneering and innovative because it departed so radically from previously accepted canons of scholarship. She collected her material directly from the children themselves rather than observing them as an outsider as her predecessors had done and corroborating this secondhand information with adult memories.

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