Christine Pawley, director of the School of Library and Information Studies, recently authored Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), which will be available in June.
Reading Places examines the role of public libraries during a time of national anxiety, recounting the history of an experimental regional library service in the early 1950s, a story that has implications far beyond the two Wisconsin counties where it took place.
Using interviews and library records, Pawley reveals the book choices of ordinary individual readers, showing how local cultures of reading interacted with formal institutions to implement an official literacy policy.
Analyzing the history of tensions between various community groups, Pawley delineates the long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences which contributed to a suspicion of official projects to expand education.
Relating a seemingly small story of library policy, she teases out the complex interaction of reading, locality, and cultural difference.
In so doing, she illuminates broader questions regarding libraries, literacy, and citizenship, reaching back to the nineteenth century and forward to the present day.