African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Negro Folklore in America

I'm wrapping up this week of scholarly work by a remarkable document: Types and Distribution of Negro Folklore in America by Vivian Costroma Osborne-Marsh. 

This is a master's thesis for the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1922, and Osborne-Marsh was among the first African Americans to receive a master’s degree from UC-Berkeley.

Her thesis is the first systematic attempt to trace the origins of African American folktales back to their African origins. She worked with published sources, while also collecting stories from living storytellers (you can see the list of 27 informants in one of the appendices). She also takes up the question of the stories shared among African American stories in the southeastern United States and Native American storytellers. Her bibliography is a good survey of what it meant to attempt to study this topic 100 years ago.

You can find out more about Osborne-Marsh's life and career at Wikipedia, and there is also a retrospective at this Berkeley webpage celebrating 150 Years of Women at Berkeley: Vivian Costroma Osborne Marsh (1897-1986) which is the source of this photograph:

There's one page missing here from the scan, so if anybody from Berkeley happens to read this and can access the hard copy at Berkeley and take a picture of p. 24 with their phone, that would be wonderful! I haven't been able to find any other scan of the thesis other than the one with the missing page. :-)

Types and Distribution of Negro Folklore in America

by Vivian Costroma Osborne-Marsh