Print Culture Research

Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth Century Osage, Iowa. (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

This study investigates the day-to-day uses of print by men and women, young and old, of all classes and ethnic backgrounds, living in a small, rural, Midwestern community--Osage, Iowa--about a hundred years ago. Using primary source material from schools, churches, the public library, work life, newspapers and a women's reading club, the study explores the interaction of print with identities of class, gender, age, ethnicity, and religion that structured, and were shaped by, the inhabitants' reading practices. A major section focuses on the Osage public library, an institution that provided a unique window into the reading practices of men and women of various ages, classes, ethnicities and religions. An extensive database of library circulation and accessions information, combined with federal and census data, sheds light on the elusive issue of "Who read what?"

Reading on the Middle Border is co-winner of the 2002 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award from the State Historical Society of Iowa for the most important book in Iowa history.  The award also went to Lucy Eldersveld Murphy for A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes. 1737-1832, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000.

" Better Than Billiards: Reading and the Public Library in Osage, Iowa, 1890-1895." Chapter in Print Culture in a Diverse America: Essays on the Historical Sociology of Print edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand ( Urbana, Ill.:  University of Illinois Press, 1998) 173-199.

"What to Read and How to Read: The Social Infrastructure of Children's Reading, Osage, Iowa, 1870-1900," The Library Quarterly,68 no. 3 (Summer, 1998): 276-97

*****

Two books in preparation:

Local Literacies: Reading, Democracy and the Pulic Library

This book-length project continues my research into the reading practices of hard-to-reach groups. The book examines the history of literacy initiatives mounted by public libraries from the nineteenth century on. Using the theories and methods of print culture history, the book considers the public library as a sposor of literacy to promote informed citizenship, focusing on periods of national anxiety over immigration, popular media, and the tensions of the Cold War. It does this through a case study of a library experiment in rural Wisconsin that attracted international attention. Themes of ethnicity, gender, and class intertwine with thie story of reading promotion and resistance. Overall, the book contributes to our understanding of the contribution that diverse and conflicting reading ideologies and practices can make towards the success or failure of public policy initiatives.

The project began when I stumbled across about 6,000 circulation records in the archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin--part of a rural library demonstration project that took place in Door and Kewaunee Counties, Wisconsin, during the early years of the Cold War. With support from a fellowship from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, I entered the library records into a database that allowed me to create reading profiles for the readers who used the project's bookmobiles and village libraries. An Old Gold Fellowship for 2001 and an Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant for 2001-2002 from The University of Iowa enabled me interview about twenty-five individuals (mostly former librarians, teachers and library patrons) who remember the project. From these interviews, along with institutional records and other documents, I learned that reading networks formed within and among three groups of—mostly--women: the librarians and library patrons who took part in the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library Demonstration (1950-1952), teachers in one- and two-room schools, many of whom were alumnae of the Door-Kewaunee County Normal School, and the homemakers clubs of Door and Kewaunee Counties—part of the county extension system that sprang up during the early decades of the twentieth century as a result of federal legislation.

 

Print in the Heartland: Reading, Domesticity, and Community in Twentieth Century America

This book analyzes interconnecting sites of reading that include public libraries, the agricultural extension service, an African American reading club, radio homemaker newsletters, and the rural press. For African-Americans, the "Y" provided reading rooms and library collections that sometimes supplemented and sometimes supplanted the public library as a source of reading materials. The Des Moines Booklovers Club was begun by a group of African American women based on the segregated Blue Triangle branch of the YWCA, and active from the 1920s to the present. Materials in the IWA provide details of Booklovers programs, participants and book titles from the 1920s to the 1950s, while the collection of the Public Library of Des Moines contains Booklovers Club records for later periods. Another print network formed through the activities of rural journalists who wrote columns for local newspapers and farm journals. For women especially, participation in print culture as both readers and writers played a key part in maintaining distinct ethnic and national ties, as well as in the creation of a new blended identity that by mid-twentieth century came to represent “middle America” in the popular imagination. Among the many articles that Iowa-born farmer Clara Steen Skott (1888-1994) wrote, for instance, were “Hilda’s Helps in Home-Making.” Such advice columns to homemakers were a staple of rural newspapers and farm journals during the first half of the twentieth century. While on the one hand they helped build and maintain an imagined community of female homemakers that stretched across the United States and beyond, on the other hand, they helped to highlight—and normalize--the experiences, values and practices of some ethnic groups, while helping to erase those of others.

Yet another print network developed around the activities of Iowa’s Radio Homemakers. Starting in the 1920s in Shenandoah, Iowa, women broadcast domestic advice regularly from their kitchens, gathering together over the airwaves a devoted following of thousands. Some also began newsletters. Leanna Driftmeier started a monthly newsletter in the mid-1920s that only lasted for a few issues. But in the 1930s, she began again, taking the newsletter’s title from the name of her radio show: Kitchen Klatter. From then until the 1980s, Kitchen Klatter Magazine appeared regularly, dispensing advice and recipes to homemakers across America and Canada, and, at least in the early years, providing a forum for readers to share their own ideas, problems and successes in their letters to “Leanna.”

Although each of the print networks had distinct characteristics based on its own historical circumstances, the networks also illustrate some themes that provide a common thread running through several chapters. These include the intertwining of reading with writing; the linking of reading and homemaking in ways that both confirm and challenge the prevailing ideology of gendered domesticity; reading as an exploration and expression of ethnic or racial identity, and the intimate implication of print in twentieth century institutional development, itself a means and a marker of class production and reproduction.

Articles to date that are based on research for these two books include:

"Reading About Race: The Book Lovers Club of Des Moines, Iowa, 1925-1941.'" (The Annals of Iowa, 65 (1) 2006: 35-59)

"Blood and Thunder on the Bookmobile: American Public Libraries and the Construction of 'the Reader,'" in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, edited by Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, (Amherst.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)

"A 'Bouncing Babe,' a 'Little Bastard:' Women, Print and the Door-Kewaunee Regional Library, 1950-1952," in Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

"Reading versus the Red Bull:  Cultural Constructions of Democracy and the Public Library in Cold War Wisconsin," American Studies,42 (3) 2001: 87-103.

*****

Lutie Stearns:  Advocate for Access

In late nineteenth century America, access to print varied widely between urban and rural areas. The Wisconsin Free Library Commission (WFLC) set out to provide reading materials to Wisconsin's rural inhabitants through a system of traveling libraries. Lutie Stearns, a founder of the WFLC and self-styled radical, believed passionately in free and equal access to information as a public good. Between 1896 and 1914 she campaigned tirelessly for the establishment of public and traveling libraries. To that end, she lobbied small-town elites and helped set up a centralized bureaucracy for library service. However, these administrative and political expediencies sometimes conflicted with her democratic ideals, reflecting underlying contradictions between radical and conservative values that persisted in librarians' practices and readersí expectations for decades.

"Advocate for Access:  Lutie Stearns and the Traveling Libraries of the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, 1895-1914," Libraries and Culture,35 no.3 434-458 (Summer, 2000).

*****
 

History of Reading: Some Places to Start

 

Home