The best recent source on this is "American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore," Christopher R. Fee and Jeffrey B. Webb, Editors, which is enormous (three volumes) and expensive - although it does have an e-version.

I'm not comfortable with the use of "Myth/Mythology" in an American context, but clearly, the editors disagree with me. The word conveys something akin to what was codified in texts from the ancient world, and that doesn't have an analogy in modern American folklore. But it is an eye-catcher and appeals to people who use the term indiscriminately, so I suspect that is why they included it in their title.

Two classic sources on American folklore are Tristram P. Coffin and Hennig Cohen, Folklore in America (1966) and Alan Axelrod and Harry Oster, The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore (2000). Of these, the latter is more comprehensive - and more recent.

We also need to point out that there is and was an enormous, complex body of Native American, indigenous folklore that existed before colonization and continues to thrive in its own right. I don't think that's the subject of your question, however.

There have been many regional studies of North American folklore, and there have been studies of various aspects of modern folklore including the urban legend. For the latter the many works of Jan Brunvand are definitive.

The scope of your question is enormous, so if you have specific interests, feel free to ask further questions.

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.