Digital audio files and transcripts from the Center's oral history project on economic development in Muncie are now available via the BSU University Libraries website.  You can go directly to it here or you can get to it by going to the Digital Media Repository, browsing the collections (Explore A-Z sorting) and finding it under the Middletown Digital Oral History Collections (you will find it if you then click on the Collections from the splash page).  Other oral history interviews, including those from the Center's Organized Labor project, are available there.

Former Center for Middletown Studies Visiting Scholar Jack Blocker has published A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860-1930 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008).  The book incorporates Blocker's research on the African-American experience in Muncie.  For more information go here.

Two collections of papers from the 2007 Small Cities Conference have now been published.  The first of these, Ken Hall ed., Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm c. 1400-1800, (Lexington Books, 2008) focuses on papers from the conference that addressed the early modern, non-western world.  It inaugurates a new Comparative Urban Studies book series issued by Lexington Books and sponsored by the Center for Middletown Studies.  For more details, go to: Comparative Urban Studies Series.  The second set of papers examines secondary cities in the modern world and appeared in the November 2008 special issue of the Journal of Urban History (James Connolly ed., Decentering Urban History: Peripheral Cities in the Modern World).  For more details go to  here and follow links to the November 2008 issue (subscription required.)

For more details on the book, go to here.



Former Director Publishes Book

Former Center Director Dwight Hoover has published A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Ivan R. Dee, 2007).  The book recalls day-to-day life on an Iowa farm during the Depression. 

For more details on the book, go to here.


"Middletown at Seventy-Five"

A Special Issue of the Indiana Magazine of History

Link:  newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/2502.html 



The Other Side of Middletown author wins Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association

The Margaret Mead Award, offered jointly by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), is presented to a younger scholar for a particular accomplishment, such as a book, film, monograph, or service, which interprets anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful to a broadly concerned public. Dr. Lassiter recieved the Margaret Mead Award in part for his book, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community, which was published in 2004, as well as for his continuing explorations of race relations and collaborative, community-based research and writing. The Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at Ball State sponsored the work of Lassiter and his collaborators on Munice, which the Center for Middletown Studies also supported. "I am extremely honored to be named the recipient of the 2006 Margaret Mead Award," Lassiter said. "As Margaret Mead was recognized widely for her commitment to both anthropology and, more importantly, to our larger society, I am expecially honored that the awards committee singled out The Other Side of Middletown as representative of the kind of work that Mead championed."

Sources:  www.aaanet.org/committees/awards/awards.htm#mead and www.marshall.edu/www/printpress.asp?ID=594