Muncie, Indiana has been synonymous with Middletown, the representative American town, since the 1920s. In 1924, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd came to Muncie as young researchers to study the community, and complete what they called a "small city study." Their research produced Middletown (1929), a book that achieved almost instant success and that has remained in print ever since. In the words of Ben Wattenberg, Middletown "limned a full-bodied portrait of a so-called "typical" American community and what its citizens thought not only about religion but but also about family, sex, politics, income, and crime. The nation was in a rolling boom. In the heartland, the Lynds found a generally up-beat community." (see Wattenberg, Prospectus to "The First Measured Century," 1999, 5).

Ten years later, Robert Lynd returned to Muncie and re-studied the community, now in the grip of the Great Depression. He and Helen wrote a second book, Middletown in Transition (1937) which also became a classic, both as a historical document and as a pioneering community study. By then Lynd had adopted a progressive political and economic philosophy and he expected to find Muncie in a "near-revolutionary mood," again according to Ben Wattenberg. But, as Lynd reported, Muncie remained true to its conservative roots, in both good times and bad.

Because of the work of Robert and Helen Lynd, Muncie was the first community to be systematically examined in the United States. Between 1975- 2000, several notable attempts were made to re-examine the community in the light of the Lynds pioneering studies. In the late 1970s, a team of sociologists led by Theodore Caplow of the University of Virginia went to Muncie to compile a new Middletown study, fifty years after the initial work. This effort, which became known as Middletown III, produced two books written by Caplow, Middletown Families (1982) and All Faithful People (1983).

Then, between 1979-1982, the producer Peter Davis brought out "Middletown," a series of six separate films which were broacast on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The producers of the six films in the Middletown series used the technique of cinema verite to highlight life in Muncie according to the research categories outlined by the Lynds: work, family, government, leisure, religion, and education.

Finally, Theodore Caplow and his research team returned to Muncie in 1998- 1999 for another study, known as Middletown IV. This study occurred in cooperation with the broadcast of Ben Wattenberg's documentary, "The First Measured Century," shown on PBS in late December, 2000. Using the techniques of survey research and participant interviews, the Caplow team produced yet another study dealing with Muncie as Middletown, this time at the close of the millennium.