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Reading Places - Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (Paperback)
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Reading Places - Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (Paperback)
Series: Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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