What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book)

Felsenstein, Frank; Connolly, James J.

ISBN 10: 1625341415 / ISBN 13: 9781625341419

Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 26372157689

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book)
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1625341415
• ISBN 13: 9781625341419
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed “Middletown” studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals.

What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library’s development in relation to the city’s cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children’s reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women’s clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behaviour within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.

About the Author

Frank Felsenstein is Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Ball State University, USA. He is author of English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World.

James J. Connolly is director of the Center for Middletown Studies and Frances Bell Distinguished Professor of History at Ball State University, USA. He is the author, most recently, of An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America.