Howard, Dorothy Mills (1902–). Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Teacher and folklorist. Howard was a pioneer and innovator in the study of children’s
folklore. In her 1938 doctoral dissertation, Folk Rhymes of American Children, she
collected directly from children, rather than from adults recollecting their childhoods, as
her predecessors such as William Wells Newell had done. She insisted throughout her
long career that the children themselves must be the focus of research regarding
children’s traditions.
The eminent British folklorists lona and Peter Opie contacted her early in their careers,
and she was a strong influence on the development of their theories and techniques
regarding the collection, documentation, and analysis of children’s folklore.
After teaching for a time in public school, Howard spent the rest of her career as an
English professor at Frostburg State College in Maryland, serving also as department
head. She retired in 1967 and then served as a consultant for the Tri-University Project in
children’s playlore of the University of Nebraska, New York University, and the
University of Washington. From 1954 to 1955 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to
study and collect children’s folklore in Australia, a subject on which she published
widely and an interest she continued for the rest of her career. Most of her publication
was in the form of articles in scholarly and professional journals. She published three
books, one an autobiographical study of her own childhood, Dorothy’s World: Childhood
in Sabine Bottom, 1902–1910 (1977); another (with Eloise Ramsey) a critical and
descriptive bibliography for use in elementary and intermediate schools, Folklore for
Children and Young People (1952); and the last one the documentation of the life of a
Mexican village boy, Pedro of Tonala (1989).
Sylvia Ann Grider
References
Grider, SylviaAnn. 1994. Dorothy Howard: Pioneer Collector of Childrens Folklore. Children’s
Folklore Review 17:3–17.

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