Center News

News from the Center for Middletown Studies

January, 2008

The Center continues to have a busy year with several projects underway and events scheduled. Please join us for our two scheduled lectures, described below.

On February 12^th, Richard Pierce, Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, will present "The Consequences of Polite Protest: African-American Response to Jim Crow in Indianapolis." The talk is co-sponsored by the Center and will take place at 3:30 PM in the Burkhardt Building, Room 100. Contact the History Department for more details at 765-285-8700.
Jonathan Rose, William R. Kenan Professor of History, Drew University, will present "Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics." His lecture will take place at 7:30 PM on Wednesday April 9^th in the Forum Room, Bracken Library. Professor Rose, a noted book historian, will also consult with the directors of the Center's What Middletown Read project while in town. His talk is co-sponsored by the Center, the Departments of English and History, and the Friends of the Bracken Library.

In addition to these two talks, the Center is engaged in a number of projects. Let me bring you up to date on them.

The What Middletown Read Project (WMRP) continues. The WMRP involves the creation of a large database document each book that each patron checked out from the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902. When complete it will be a valuable and unique resource for those interested in understanding print culture in turn of the century middle America. (Please see the summary at http://www.bsu.edu/middletown/wmr/ for more detail. In additional to the pilot database completed in 2005, we have now compiled the data on all of the library's 6,300 patrons, a substantial task in itself. We have also recorded approximately 50,000 (out of 190,000) transactions. The Center has joined with University Libraries in seeking new funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Maria Staton, lead researcher on the project, has applied for funding from the American Council for Learned Societies in connection with the project. Stay tuned for further details.
Papers from the 2007 Small Cities Conference will appear in an upcoming volume to be edited by Ken Hall and in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Urban History to be edited by Jim Connolly. Look to this space for publication announcements and details on the next conference (in 2009).
The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County has generously provided funds for a study of economic development activity in Muncie during the past 35 years. Warren Vander Hill and J. Paul Mitchell will conduct interviews with local business, civic, and planning leaders to document past efforts at economic development. The Center will issue a report and make presentations later in 2008.
The Center and University Libraries continue to explore ways of exploiting the archival materials connected with Middletown research and local history in the Second Life virtual world. A pilot project is underway to create a Middletown presence in that environment, with additional work planned for later this year.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with your thoughts, comments or questions about the Center's activities.

Jim Connolly
Director
jconnoll@bsu.edu.

August 31, 2007

Greetings at the start of new academic year. The upcoming semester will be a busy one for the Center and its collaborators. Among the events and activities on tap are a conference on oral history, a lecture on efforts to ban books in the American heartland by Shirley Wiegand, of the Marquette University Law School, and support for an educational foundations course devoted to researching the history of local schools and their surrounding communities. Among the highlights:

The Center for Middletown Studies will co-sponsor Ball State University Libraries' "Can You Hear Me Now: Digitizing the Voices of the Past," a conference on digitizing oral histories. It will take place Thursday, September 20 in the Alumni Center, Ball State University. The conference will feature an address by Luke Eric Lassiter and Beth Campbell, co-authors of The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African-American Community (Alta Mira Press, 2004). For more details, go to http://www.bsu.edu/library/conference/oralhistory/.

On October 4^th at 7:30 PM , Shirley A. Wiegand will present a lecture entitled "Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland." Based on a book of the same title published by the University of Oklahoma Press and co-written with her husband Wayne Wiegand, her talk will explore a controversial effort to suppress radical literature in Oklahoma in 1940. Wayne Wiegand has served for the past two years as a member of the advisory board for the Center's What Middletown Read project, which recreates the records of the Muncie Public Library during the 1890s in searchable online form.

Selected papers from the 5^th Small Cities Conference, held in April, 2007, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Urban History. It includes papers by Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College; James Heitzman, University of California-Davis; Alan Lessoff, Illinois State University; Dieter Buse, Laurentian University; Samuel Martland, Rose Hulman Institute; and Christopher Airries, Ball State University. The issue will be edited by the Center Director, James Connolly. Kenneth Hall, of the BSU History Department, is planning to publish an additional volume of conference papers focusing on the early modern period.

Mark Malaby and John Clausen, from the Department of Educational Studies, are teaching two sections of their Foundations of Education course, which focuses on the interplay between local schools and their communities. The Center has provided assistance in the development and execution of each section (which focuses on a specific city school.) When complete, they will have developed histories and descriptions of each of Muncie's neighborhoods and the schools that help define them.

The Center has also entered into a partnership with University Libraries and BSU's Center for Media Design to develop a presence in the virtual world Second Life. It will include a virtual Center for Middletown Studies that features reference services, an online exhibit, and an interactive teaching archive.