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Among some of the titles under consideration are The Black Man in the West, The Rat: Man's Invited Affliction, Black Patriots of the American Revolution, and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Students and their instructors at the Laboratory, established to train inner-city young people for careers in museums and related fields, will create and produce the Bicentennial exhibitions.

[[underline]]SPECIAL BICENTENNIAL PROJECTS[[/underline]]

I. [[underline]]Festival of American Folklife[[/underline]]

On the Mall, the Division of Performing Arts, in cooperation with the National Park Service, plans for the summer of 1976 its most comprehensive [[underline]]Festival of American Folklife[[/underline]]. The purpose of the Festival is to exhibit the vitality of today's continuing folk traditions in a living museum setting. The flow of activities and performances will be built around five themes illustrating the origins and continuities of American culture.

The first theme is Old Ways in the New World. It will deal with the culture which the immigrants brought with them to the new world -- their crafts and skills, their song and dance. In addition, examples of music and crafts still central to the life of foreign cultures today will be compared with their American analogues.

Evolving out of Old Ways in the New World is a special theme area, African Diaspora.  It will deal with material from the Black peoples of the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Canada.  Here will be explored the relationships and interconnections among the many different but linked expressions of American Black culture.  It is an indigenous product of the American environment but has emerged from a much more complicated cultural process than the transplanted cultures included in the Old Ways theme area.

The Native Americans is the third theme, and its principal thrust will be to replace the stereotype of American Indian people as quaint exotics with a more realistic picture of a tradition-oriented people striving to adapt their culture to new experiences. Presentation will take place within the structure of eight cultural areas ranging from the Northwest Coast and the California Basin to the Northeast woodlands. The crafts, music, and dance, part