Government Documents

National Endowment for the Arts. (2006). NEARTS: A Moving Partnership (Vol.1). Washington DC: Retrieved March 17, 2008, National Endowment for the Arts: http://www.nea.gov/about/Nearts/10-2006vol1/NEAARTS10.pdf

This document compiles the accomplishments the National Endowment of the Arts has achieved in dance before its 40th anniversary. It highlights the overall progression of the legitimacy of dance through education, financing, and important performance avenues. Also discussed is how slow moving the endeavor to legitimize dance as an art form was despite its financial backing. This source expresses the difficulty in legitimizing dance in general as an art form and can be used to compare the struggles many genres of performance dance have faced to those that current social dance are enduring now.

Aldrich, E. (1998). Western Social Dance: An Overview of the Collection. Washington, DC: Retrieved February 11, 2008, via GPO Access, Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/diessay0.html

This is a link to a collection of documents compiled by the Library of Congress. The documents are organized in time-lined manuals ranging from the time of the late Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. Each manual gives a detailed analysis of the social dance of that time period and its role in society. Most manuals discuss a much different atmosphere in which social dance was practiced almost as a performance and had a more technical base than current social dance. A manual of referencing literature through out that range of time that contained anti-dance emotions is also included. This is a great source for historical reference that could be used to illustrate how the practice, role, and views of social dance have greatly changed in society.