Main Street Public Library
Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5705651 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Douglas Davis (corresponding author), D G Davis |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 612-613 |
| Publication date | 2012-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jas203 |
| OpenAlex | W2128262295 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
The historiography on American public libraries has long been characterized by institutional and biographical works, many of them commemorative in nature. From the mid-twentieth century onward, scholars inside and outside the library field have tried to be more comprehensive, integrating current theory into their perspectives. Wayne A. Wiegand—a notable and prolific library historian and the author of the definitive biography of Melvil Dewey—culminates here his long-standing examination of the multiple roles public libraries played in four upper midwestern small towns—Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Osage, Iowa; Lexington, Michigan; and Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Each community was settled by middle-class, white, Protestant folk of New England heritage and remained relatively homogeneous throughout the period under study. The author questions the conventional paradigm of libraries as a positive and neutral influence and “the ‘library faith’ that assumes that without an informed and educated citizenry democracy cannot exist [and] that without libraries available to all citizens Americans cannot be fully educated or informed” (p. 3). Both of these premises grew from nineteenth-century roots, and he regards them as top-down assumptions, which contrast with his bottom-up perspective. Wiegand argues that public libraries have been shaped by not only their managers and benefactors but also by the people who have voluntarily used them. Applying recent scholarship of the history of reading and the history of public space to the institutions he studies leads him to read popular fiction, present-day “fictional media,” as a prime factor that explains the enthusiasm, real and symbolic, for public libraries. This conclusion required a century's worth of primary data from the four libraries, including the catalogs of book collections and circulation-use records—as well as library and local archival records
Biography · Democracy · Faith · Historiography · Mainstream · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · History · Law · Library Science and Administration
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,27 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2020 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |