Download or read book What Middletown Read written by Frank Felsenstein and published by Studies in Print Culture and t. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Middletown written by Sarah Moon and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old Eli likes baggy clothes, baseball caps, and one girl in particular. Her seventeen-year-old sister Anna is more traditionally feminine; she loves boys and staying out late. They are sisters, and they are also the only family each can count on. Their dad has long been out of the picture, and their mom lives at the mercy of her next drink. When their mom lands herself in enforced rehab, Anna and Eli are left to fend for themselves. With no legal guardian to keep them out of foster care, they take matters into their own hands: Anna masquerades as Aunt Lisa, and together she and Eli hoard whatever money they can find. But their plans begin to unravel as quickly as they were made, and they are always way too close to getting caught. Eli and Anna have each gotten used to telling lies as a means of survival, but as they navigate a world without their mother, they must learn how to accept help, and let other people in.

Download or read book Middletown Families written by and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Middletown Families was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Fifty years after publication of Robert and Helen Lloyd's classic studies, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), the Middletown III Project picked up and continued their exploration of American values and institutions. By duplicating the original studies - in many cases by using the same questions - this team of social scientists attempted to gauge the changes that had taken place in Muncie, Indiana, since the 1920s. In Middletown Families, the first book to emerge from this project, Theodore Caplow and his colleagues reveal that many widely discussed changes in family life, such as the breakdown of traditional male/female roles, increased conflict between parents and children, and disintegration of extended family ties, are more perceived than actual. Their evidence suggests that the Middletown family seems to be stronger and more tolerant, with closer bonds and greater marital satisfaction than fifty years ago. Instead of breaking it apart, the pressures of modern society may have drawn the family closer together.

Download or read book Ball State University written by E. Bruce Geelhoed, Michael G. Szajewski, and Brandon T. Pieczko and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, celebrated its centennial anniversary in 2018. Begun in 1918 as the Eastern Division of the Indiana State Normal School, Ball State remained a branch campus of Indiana State until 1929 when it became Ball State Teachers College, Indiana's fourth public institution of higher education. In 1965 the teachers college became Ball State University. Throughout its history, Ball State's distinguishing characteristic has been the positive interactions between students, faculty, and members of the community. This book will show how these interactions have worked out at Ball State in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in social organizations such as student government, fraternities, sororities, and clubs throughout the region. The book will also show how the members of the Ball family have played a major role in the growth and development of the university.

Download or read book The Nazi Seizure of Power written by William Sheridan Allen and published by Franklin Watts. This book was released on 1984 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the propaganda and politics that brought Naziism to power in one German town where the population was predominately Lutheran and the largest local employer was the Civil Service.

Download or read book The Good Country written by Jon K. Lauck and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The History of Reading Volume 3 written by R. Crone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-26 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We inhabit a textually super-saturated and increasingly literate world. This volume encourages readers to consider the diverse methodologies used by historians of reading globally, and indicates how future research might take up the challenge of recording and interpreting the practices of readers in an increasingly digitized society.

Download or read book Companion to the History of the Book written by Simon Eliot and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrated text on the history of the book, completely revised, updated and expanded The revised and updated edition of The Companion to the History of the Book offers a global survey of the book’s history, through print and electronic text. Already well established as a standard survey of the historiography of the book, this new, expanded edition draws on a decade of advanced scholarship to present current research on paper, printing, binding, scientific publishing, the history of maps, music and print, the profession of authorship and lexicography. The text explores the many approaches to the book from the early clay tablets of Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia to today’s burgeoning electronic devices. The expert contributions delve into such fascinating topics as archives and paperwork, and present new chapters on Arabic script, the Slavic, Canadian, African and Australasian book, new textual technologies, and much more. Containing a wealth of illustrative examples and case studies to dramatize the exciting history of the book, the text is designed for academics, students and anyone interested in the subject.

Download or read book What Readers Do written by Beth Driscoll and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth Century America written by Christine Pawley and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For well over one hundred years, libraries open to the public have played a crucial part in fostering in Americans the skills and habits of reading and writing, by routinely providing access to standard forms of print: informational genres such as newspapers, pamphlets, textbooks, and other reference books, and literary genres including poetry, plays, and novels. Public libraries continue to have an extraordinary impact; in the early twenty-first century, the American Library Association reports that there are more public library branches than McDonald's restaurants in the United States. Much has been written about libraries from professional and managerial points of view, but less so from the perspectives of those most intimately involved—patrons and librarians. Drawing on circulation records, patron reviews, and other archived materials, Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America underscores the evolving roles that libraries have played in the lives of American readers. Each essay in this collection examines a historical circumstance related to reading in libraries. The essays are organized in sections on methods of researching the history of reading in libraries; immigrants and localities; censorship issues; and the role of libraries in providing access to alternative, nonmainstream publications. The volume shows public libraries as living spaces where individuals and groups with diverse backgrounds, needs, and desires encountered and used a great variety of texts, images, and other media throughout the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance written by Christopher N. Phillips and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850–1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.

Download or read book Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis written by James J. Connolly and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

Download or read book Cataloging Collaborations and Partnerships written by Rebecca L. Mugridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes written by Jonathan Rose and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which books did the British working classes read--and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy: how much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarian intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These intriguing questions, which until recently historians considered unanswerable, are addressed in this book. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. It offers a new method for cultural historians--an "audience history" that recovers the responses of readers, students, theatergoers, filmgoers, and radio listeners. Jonathan Rose provides an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves, told from their perspective. He draws on workers’ memoirs, oral history, social surveys, opinion polls, school records, library registers, and newspapers. Through its novel and challenging approach to literary history, the book gains access to politics, ideology, popular culture, and social relationships across two centuries of British working-class experience.

Download or read book Conrad s Reading written by Helen Chambers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Jane Eyre in German Lands written by Lynne Tatlock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynne Tatlock examines the transmission, diffusion, and literary survival of Jane Eyre in the German-speaking territories and the significance and effects thereof, 1848-1918. Engaging with scholarship on the romance novel, she presents an historical case study of the generative power and protean nature of Brontë's new romance narrative in German translation, adaptation, and imitation as it involved multiple agents, from writers and playwrights to readers, publishers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, adaptors, and translators. Jane Eyre in German Lands traces the ramifications in the paths of transfer that testify to widespread creative investment in romance as new ideas of women's freedom and equality topped the horizon and sought a home, especially in the middle classes. As Tatlock outlines, the multiple German instantiations of Brontë's novel-four translations, three abridgments, three adaptations for general readers, nine adaptations for younger readers, plays, farces, and particularly the fiction of the popular German writer E. Marlitt and its many adaptations-evince a struggle over its meaning and promise. Yet precisely this multiplicity (repetition, redundancy, and proliferation) combined with the romance narrative's intrinsic appeal in the decades between the March Revolutions and women's franchise enabled the cultural diffusion, impact, and long-term survival of Jane Eyre as German reading. Though its focus on the circulation of texts across linguistic boundaries and intertwined literary markets and reading cultures, Jane Eyre in German Lands unsettles the national paradigm of literary history and makes a case for a fuller and inclusive account of the German literary field.

Download or read book Edith Wharton s The Custom of the Country written by Laura Rattray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading Wharton scholars from Europe, and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Edith Wharton's 1913 tour de force, The Custom of the Country.