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

Browse Items (1924 total)

Document

The Lancers - Ralph Page's historical notes

In the pages of his Northern Junket magazine, caller and dance historian Ralph Page enjoyed sharing articles based on his dance research. He included a six-part series on the Lancers. California… View item
Website

The James W. Kimball Traditional Music & Dance in NYS Collection

Jim Kimball is a well-known historian who focuses on the music and dance traditions of upstate New York. The James W. Kimball Traditional Music and Dance in New York State Collection is a curated… View item
Document

The Independence (PA) Lancers

For moving images of the dance, click here and hereThis is Bob Dalsemer's account of discovering an old dance form maintained in a rural Pennsylvania community:"On two occasions in 1979, I had the… View item
Document

The History of Square-Dancing - S. Foster Damon

The History of Square Dancing, published by S. Foster Damon in 1957, is one of the few books that presents a broad picture of the subject. The book was a reprint of his 1952 article published in the… View item
Moving Image

The Great American Folk Dance

The caller featured in many sequences is Bob Van Antwerp. This film was produced by KBYU, Provo, Utah, produced in cooperation with the Associated Square Dance Clubs of Utah. The original film had… View item
Sound

The Girl I Left Behind Me (clip) - Lee Bedford, Jr.

In his brief look at the development of singing calls, Tony Parkes cites the publication of this dance in 1925 as "the earliest description of a singing square I've found so far (in fairly shallow… View item
Moving Image

The Farmer

Square Dancing at the Firemen's Hall in Grafton, OH. This dance starts as variation of the classic Cut Away Six / Divide the Ring figure, with additional weaving back to place by the lead… View item
Document

The Dos-a-Dos

The author looks starts by examining the pronunciation and different spellings of this figure. He then explores variations, all of which involve a handhold: Southern Highland or Mountaineer… View item
Moving Image

The Dancing "Silver Spurs" - 1951

This is an excerpt from a half-hour film, made in 1951 by Standard Oil, about the Silver Spurs, a performing dance group from Spokane, WA. The group was founded in 1947 by E. S. "Red"… View item
Document

The Country Dance Goes To Town (1940 article)

Article from 1940 extolling the virtues of country dances—square dances, circle dances, and contra—and describing their recent rise in popularity. The author declares that country dances "provide… View item
Document

The Care and Feeding of Exhibition Sets

This article fromAmerican Squares outlines items to be taken into consideration when developing an exhibition square dance team:===Putting the “dance” in square dancing is the basic… View item
Document

The Calling Computer

In the late 1980s, Don Beck programmed his Macintosh computer to be able to call modern square dances, automatically selecting calls according to a programmed set of rules. Beck had been associated… View item