Also very interesting from Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies, a project attempting to create a virtual Muncie in the 1920s: Robert and Helen Lynd’s seminal investigation into the social conditions in Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s not only marked the community as the nation’s Middletown, it also generated a substantial body of source material documenting social experiences in it. Simply put, Middletown research has made Muncie the best documented city of its size and thus the ideal setting for the digital re-creation of ground-level American social history.
Leave a CommentTag: microhistory
The What Middletown Read Project (I’d love to see them add a spatial dimension): “What Middletown Read” is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 6, 1891 through December 3, 1902. It documents every book that every library patron borrowed during that period, with the exception of one gap from May 28, 1892 to November 5, 1894. For more details, follow the links below.
4 CommentsWith some fudging on how many items can be in a “top five”, here are my top six “top five” lists (in no particular order): 1. Top Five History Books (Listed in the order in which I read them) 1. Rats, Lice & History: The book that really made historical thinking click for me in my first history class freshman year. 2. A Midwife’s Tale: The book professors have assigned to me in three different courses, a great microhistory. 3. Nature’s Metropolis: The book that has stuck with me for years–I just really like Cronon’s approach. 4. Nation among Nations:…
One CommentEven though I am still trying to finish my MA thesis, I cannot help but think forward to finding a dissertation topic. Now I like my MA thesis topic, and I think there is still much I could do with it, but I want to really love my dissertation topic (I think you need to in order to finish it). So recently I have been thinking about some potential avenues that might bring some of my diverse historical interests together into one project. In the past, I have dove directly into primary sources, and I probably will start that way…
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