Back to Middletown
Subtitle: Three Generations of Sociological Reflections
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: June 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 149
ISBN-13: 9780804734936
Subjects: Social Science; Social life and customs; Muncie (Ind.); Social History; Social Situations And Conditions; Sociology - General; Archaeology / Anthropology; Social conditions; Sociology; Anthropology - General; 1892-; Lynd, Robert Staughton,; Middletown
Description: "Published in 1929, Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd's Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture was destined to become a sociological point of reference for the quality of life in an "average" American town in the 1920s. Their Middletown in Transition, a 1937 restudy of the same community - now known to be Muncie, Indiana - provided a second point of reference on community values in the midst of the great American depression.".

"Back to Middletown differs from the numerous other investigations and analyses of one of the most famous community studies in the history of sociology. The book addresses, from a fresh perspective, major issues that have confronted sociology and social anthropology: relative levels of analysis, the relationship of empirical observation to theory building and conceptual frameworks of interpretation, and controversies focusing on the structure of power in America.

In addition to its value and import as a theoretical work, the book takes up questions that reflect the contemporary contradictions and dissonances in the American social fabric. As the author demonstrates, the story of Middletown is a continuing narrative, whose end is yet to be written, encapsulating the pain of social and economic alienation, political war, religious messianism, and personal demoralization."--BOOK JACKET.