Reading places
Subtitle: literacy, democracy, and the public library in Cold War America
By: Christine Pawley.
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781558498211; 9781558498228
Subjects: Door-Kewaunee Regional Library -- History; Public libraries -- Wisconsin -- Door County -- History -- 20th century; Public libraries -- Wisconsin -- Kewaunee County -- History -- 20th century; Rural libraries -- Wisconsin -- Door County -- History -- 20th century; Rural libraries -- Wisconsin -- Kewaunee County -- History -- 20th century; Books and reading -- Wisconsin -- Door County -- History -- 20th century; Books and reading -- Wisconsin -- Kewaunee County -- History -- 20th century; Libraries and community -- United States -- Case studies
Genres: Case studies
Description: This book recounts the history of an experimental regional library service in the early 1950s, a story that has implications far beyond the two Wisconsin counties where it took place. Using interviews and library records, Christine Pawley reveals the choices of ordinary individual readers, showing how local cultures of reading interacted with formal institutions to implement an official literacy policy. Central to the experiment were well-stocked bookmobiles that brought books to rural districts and the one-room schools that dotted the region. Three years after the project began, state officials and local librarians judged it an overwhelming success. Library circulation figures soared to two-and-a-half times their previous level. Over 90 percent of grade-school children in the rural schools used the bookmobile service, and their reading scores improved beyond expectation. Despite these successes, however, local communities displayed deeply divided reactions. Some welcomed the bookmobiles and new library services wholeheartedly, valuing print and reading as essential to the exercise of democracy, and keen to widen educational opportunities for children growing up on hardscrabble farms where books and magazines were rare. Others feared the intrusion of government into their homes and communities, resented the tax increases that library services entailed, and complained about the subversive or immoral nature of some books. Analyzing the history of tensions between various community groups, Pawley delineates the long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences which contributed to a suspicion of official projects to expand education. Relating a seemingly small story of library policy, she teases out the complex interaction of reading, locality, and cultural difference. In so doing, she illuminates broader questions regarding libraries, literacy, and citizenship, reaching back to the nineteenth century and forward to the present day.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Literacy debates and dangers; title: The geography of rural reading; title: Reaching readers with the Wisconsin idea; title: Reading : for whom, and what?; title: Children, teachers, and the rural school; title: What to read : children's choices; title: Women, print, and domesticity; title: Winners and losers : the referendum and its aftermath.