This handbook surveys the materials, approaches, and contexts of American folklore and folklife studies to guide folklorists and students/scholars of American culture, history, and society through more than 350 years of work in the subject. To cover the contextual and behavioral aspects as well as textual materials of American folklore and folklife studies, the handbook contains forty-three chapters under four major headings of (1) background, theory, and practice; (2) genres, processes, and practitioners; (3) settings, contexts, and institutions; and (4) groups, networks, and communities. In addition to long-standing areas of cultural study such as folktales and speech, the handbook includes areas that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, poetry slams, sexual orientations and practices, neurodiverse identities (e.g., Aspies), disability groups (e.g., deaf), and bodylore. The result is a reference work that serves as both a survey of folklore and folklife studies as they have been practiced and a guide to their future. Shaping these studies has been the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries of the United States, relative youth of the nation and its legacy of mass immigration, mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous and racialized population, and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. The handbook is a reference, therefore, to American studies as well as the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.