Reading Places

by Pawley, Christine

• ISBN13: 9781558498228
• ISBN10: 1558498222
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-30
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Christine Pawley is director of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. She is author of Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Prnt in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa, which won the Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award of the State Historical Society of lowa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Literacy Debates and Dangers	p. 1
The Geography of Rural Reading	p. 33
Reaching Readers with the Wisconsin Idea	p. 67
Reading-for Whom, and What?	p. 112
Children, Teachers, and the Rural School	p. 153
What to Read: Children's Choices	p. 177
Women, Print, and Domesticity	p. 205
Winners and Losers: The Referendum and Its Aftermath	p. 235
Epilogue	p. 259
Wisconsin Free Library Commission Statistics	p. 283
The D-K Database	p. 287
Index	p. 297
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