What Middletown Read

What Middletown Read PDF Author: Frank Felsenstein
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781625341419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 behavior 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.

What Middletown Read

What Middletown Read PDF Author: Frank Felsenstein
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781625341419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 behavior 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.

The Good Country

The Good Country PDF Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806191414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.

Cataloging Collaborations and Partnerships

Cataloging Collaborations and Partnerships PDF Author: Rebecca L. Mugridge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134912056
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cataloging Collaborations and Partnerships provides the reader with many examples of successful methods in which libraries have collaborated with each other to achieve common goals. Addressing a variety of cataloging and managerial challenges in national, public, academic, and international libraries and other organizations, it will be enlightening to readers who are investigating new ways of meeting their patrons’ needs. The collaborative efforts described in this book fall into a number of broad categories: cooperative cataloging and authority initiatives, cataloging partnerships, merging and migrating online catalogs, development of training and documentation, and collaborative approaches to special projects. Included are four chapters that address collaborative projects in Europe, the West Indies, the Galapagos Islands, and South Sudan. Catalogers, managers and administrators will find inspiration in these important, and in some cases, historic collaborations. They will understand how collaborations and partnerships in cataloging will help them achieve more by sharing resources and expertise, sharing the burden of new projects and initiatives, and fostering innovation and new ways of thinking. This book was published as a triple special issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly.

What Readers Do

What Readers Do PDF Author: Beth Driscoll
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350375160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shining a spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with the book industry, digital environments, and each other. We live in an era when book clubs, bibliomemoirs, Bookstagram and BookTok are as valuable to some readers as solitary reading moments. The product of nearly two decades of qualitative research into readers and reading culture, What Readers Do examines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care – to show how readers intertwine private and social behaviors, and both reinforce and oppose the structures of capitalism. Analyzing reading as a post-digital practice that is a synthesis of both print and digital modes and on- and offline behaviors, Driscoll presents a methodology for studying readers that connects book history, literary studies, sociology, and actor-network theory. Arguing for the vitality, agency, and creativity of readers, this book sheds light on how we read now - and on how much more readers do than just read.

Conrad's Reading

Conrad's Reading PDF Author: Helen Chambers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331976487X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book aligns concepts and methods from book history with new literary research on a globally studied writer. An innovative three-part approach, combining close reading the evidence of reading, scrutiny of international book distribution circuits, and of Conrad's many fictional representations of reading, illuminates his childhood, maritime and later shore-based reading. After an overview of the empirical evidence of Conrad's reading, his sparsely documented twenty years reading at sea and in port is reconstructed. An examination the reading practices of his famous narrator Marlow then serves to link Conrad's own maritime and shore-based reading. Conrad's subsequent networked reading, shared with his closest male friends, and with literate multilingual women, is examined within the context of Edwardian reading practices. His fictional representations of reading and material texts are highlighted throughout, including genre trends, periodical reading, reading spaces and their lighting, and the use of reading as therapy. The book should appeal both to Conrad scholars and to historians of reading.

Republics of Letters

Republics of Letters PDF Author: Peter Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743326033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature.

Reading Places

Reading Places PDF Author: Christine Pawley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the role of public libraries during a time of national anxiety.

Yale Medical Journal

Yale Medical Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes the Proceedings of the Connecticut State Medical Society.

Hoosier Philanthropy

Hoosier Philanthropy PDF Author: Gregory R. Witkowski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253064155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first in-depth history of philanthropy in Indiana. Philanthropy has been central to the development of public life in Indiana over the past two centuries. Hoosier Philanthropy explores the role of philanthropy in the Hoosier state, showing how voluntary action within Indiana has created and supported multiple visions of societal good. Featuring 15 articles, Hoosier Philanthropy charts the influence of different types of nonprofit Hoosier organizations and people, including foundations, service providers, volunteers, and individual donors.

The History of Reading

The History of Reading PDF Author: S. Towheed
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230316786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together research from a variety of countries and periods, this volume introduces readers to the diverse approaches used to recover the evidence of reading through history in different societies, and asks whether reading practices are always conditioned by specific local circumstances or whether broader patterns might emerge.