Small Town America Research Articles

Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History Jack Glazier Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History, by Lee Shai Weissbach. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 436 pp. $45.00. Patterns of Jewish life in small American towns took shape from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II. That period began with the settlement of German and Central European Jews throughout the United States, followed by the settlement of eastern European Jews in the four decades after 1881. By the mid-twentieth century, Jewish communal life in small towns had reached a high point, but an array of social, economic, and demographic forces pointed toward the inevitable decline of those communities. Small Jewish communities emerged in small American towns, although most of the latter lacked any Jewish population at all. American cities by contrast consistently attracted large Jewish concentrations, and indeed our understanding of the American Jewish experience is conditioned by the predominantly urban character of Jewish life. By the mid-1920s, nearly 200 American cities had Jewish populations of at least a thousand people. At the same time that most Jews were gravitating toward large and midsize urban locales, others were establishing themselves in towns of modest size, many of which counted their Jewish population in the hundreds. Understanding the organization and dynamics of these "triple-digit" communities—those places with a Jewish population of more than a hundred but less than a thousand—is the worthy task that Lee Shai Weissbach has set for himself. In 1927, 490 triple digit Jewish communities dotted the country, yet until the publication of this important volume we have had very little analytical understanding of how Jews made their way in these locales. Instead, we have had to rely on amateur local histories, synagogue commemorative volumes, and the like. But this is not a dry, academic account. It is instead a lively, well written, and accessible book, rich in illustrative cases, about a segment of American Jewish life long neglected by historians and social scientists. It is sure to interest a lay readership as well. Ranging widely across the 490 communities, Weissbach singles out a dozen representative towns for closer scrutiny. He relies on demographic data from the federal census as well as population figures from various Jewish [End Page 204] sources. City directories, local community and synagogue histories, newspaper and magazine stories, and archival papers, including those of the Industrial Removal Office, also provided very useful material for the author's painstaking research. In chapters on settlement patterns, population stability and mobility, livelihood and class, family life, congregational organization, synagogue history, religious leadership, cultural patterns among both German and eastern European Jews, and prejudice, Weissbach argues that "place matters." "Place" is indeed the leitmotif of the book. Small Jewish communities and their larger urban counterparts of course shared many common features, including the estrangements and affinities between German and eastern European Jews and Jewish efforts in general to remain distinct while still seeking acceptance by non-Jewish neighbors. Large and small communities alike also struggled with their desire to insure Jewish cultural and/or religious continuity between generations at the same time that those efforts were undermined by cultural assimilation and other blandishments of a society gradually removing its barriers against Jews, if not Americans of African descent. Yet because place matters, triple-digit communities were not simply projections onto a smaller screen of Jewish life in cities. Rather, Jewish institutions and conduct in small towns were adaptations in their own right to the distinctive local environment, including its social, economic, geographical, and demographic features. Triple-digit communities were, for example, more economically monolithic—almost completely middle class—than either large or midsize Jewish communities, where a Jewish working class and Jewish poverty were apparent. Middle-class status in small communities was established predominantly through retail trade as Jews became merchants or entrepreneurs in such businesses as junk collecting. Challenges of small town living such as providing a Jewish education for their children, promoting endogamous marriage by expanding their children's Jewish contacts beyond the community, organizing synagogues, procuring the services of a rabbi, arranging for a kosher meat supply...

Cruel and Unusual Light: Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane's The Monster

Cruel and Unusual Light:Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane’s The Monster Jonathan Tadashi Naito (bio) Stephen Crane's 1898 novella, The Monster, is among the most cryptic and the most ruthless of his works. In brief, it tells the story of a small town thrown into chaos when Henry Johnson, a black coachman employed by a white doctor, Dr. Trescott, literally loses his face. In the first half of the novella, Henry Johnson's actions range from fatherly to romantic to heroic; but after his face is burned off during his daring rescue of the doctor's son from a chemical fire, Johnson is branded a "monster" and ostracized from the town.1 In a crucial confrontation soon after the fire, Judge Hagenthorpe, an influential town elder, urges Dr. Trescott to simply let Johnson die. When Trescott refuses, the judge and the doctor set out the terms within which Henry Johnson will be described for the remainder of the novella: "He will be your creation, you understand. He is purely your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life. You are making him, and he will be a monster, and with no mind." "He will be what you like, judge," cried Trescott, in sudden, polite fury. (The Monster 32) As this passage suggests, Crane's novella is just as interested in the residents of the fictional town of Whilomville as it is in the character at the center of the uproar: they are the ones who label the living Henry Johnson an undead "thing" and thus represent the true creators of the [End Page 35] so-called monster. Even as it touches upon relatively abstract questions such as the relationship between being and non-being, Crane's novella makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the person at the center of the controversy is an African American man in a largely white small town. This issue has deservedly been at the center of recent scholarly interest in The Monster.2 Soon after its publication, critics began to speculate about what could have possibly inspired The Monster's narrative of alienation in small town America and the vivid and disquieting imagery used to describe Henry Johnson. Early critics often begun and ended their discussion of Whilomville by making mention of Port Jervis, New York, where Crane spent much of his youth. In one of the first attempts to identify Henry Johnson with an actual person, Thomas Beer asserted that Henry Johnson was inspired by Levi Hume, a "disfigured teamster" from Port Jervis, though Beer seems to have been thwarted in his attempts to verify his theory through Crane's relatives (Levenson xiii). John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane includes a brief statement about the origins of the story that has been cited by many subsequent critics: 'The town is based on Port Jervis, as the "monster" was suggested one niece says by a Port Jervis refuse-collector whose face was eaten with cancer; but it is any New York town' (193).3 However, fixating on this individual as the source for Henry Johnson has at least one serious limitation: it does nothing to explain Crane's decision to center so much of The Monster upon racial difference: like Crane, the Port Jervis refuse-collector was white (Stallman 333). Bill Brown's 1996 study, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, greatly expanded the historical and cultural context for Crane's novella. Even as he accepts the refuse-collector as the immediate inspiration for Henry Johnson, Brown also locates Johnson in relation to a number of embodiments of fin de siècle monstrosity: "'the last slave set free by the Supreme Court,'" an "idiot savant" known as "Blind Tom"; the black dandy of the minstrel stage, "Zip Coon"; and, most suggestively, a man who was actually named "Henry Johnson": a microcephalic African American born in New Jersey (despite his supposed African origins), who was easily the most famous of several sideshow freaks known as both "What is It?" and "Zip" (208, 214–17). He thus reads Crane's Henry Johnson as undergoing a "metamorphosis...

Jewish life in small-town America: a history

Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History, by Lee Shai Weissbach. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 436 pp. $45.00. Patterns of Jewish life in small American towns took shape from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II. That period began with the settlement of German and Central European Jews throughout the United States, followed by the settlement of eastern European Jews in the four decades after 1881. By the mid-twentieth century, Jewish communal life in small towns had reached a high point, but an array of social, economic, and demographic forces pointed toward the inevitable decline of those communities. Small Jewish communities emerged in small American towns, although most of the latter lacked any Jewish population at all. American cities by contrast consistently attracted large Jewish concentrations, and indeed our understanding of the American Jewish experience is conditioned by the predominantly urban character of Jewish life. By the mid-1920s, nearly 200 American cities had Jewish populations of at least a thousand people. At the same time that most Jews were gravitating toward large and midsize urban locales, others were establishing themselves in towns of modest size, many of which counted their Jewish population in the hundreds. Understanding the organization and dynamics of these triple-digit communities-those places with a Jewish population of more than a hundred but less than a thousand-is the worthy task that Lee Shai Weissbach has set for himself. In 1927, 490 triple digit Jewish communities dotted the country, yet until the publication of this important volume we have had very little analytical understanding of how Jews made their way in these locales. Instead, we have had to rely on amateur local histories, synagogue commemorative volumes, and the like. But this is not a dry, academic account. It is instead a lively, well written, and accessible book, rich in illustrative cases, about a segment of American Jewish life long neglected by historians and social scientists. It is sure to interest a lay readership as well. Ranging widely across the 490 communities, Weissbach singles out a dozen representative towns for closer scrutiny. He relies on demographic data from the federal census as well as population figures from various Jewish sources. City directories, local community and synagogue histories, newspaper and magazine stories, and archival papers, including those of the Industrial Removal Office, also provided very useful material for the author's painstaking research. In chapters on settlement patterns, population stability and mobility, livelihood and class, family life, congregational organization, synagogue history, religious leadership, cultural patterns among both German and eastern European Jews, and prejudice, Weissbach argues that place matters. Place is indeed the leitmotif of the book. Small Jewish communities and their larger urban counterparts of course shared many common features, including the estrangements and affinities between German and eastern European Jews and Jewish efforts in general to remain distinct while still seeking acceptance by non-Jewish neighbors. …

European Cinema. Face to Face with Hollywood

Taken from a still depicting Nicole Kidman in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), the cover illustration of Thomas Elsaesser's latest publication provides an introduction to some of the characteristics and paradoxes of the relationship between European cinema and Hollywood which the book sets out to explore. The image comes from a film which is ostensibly a critique of small-town America, but which also can be seen to comment on the ‘fortress’ mentality in today's Europe. Dogville was produced through the complex processes of independent filmmaking in the EU, combining small-scale entrepreneurship and an internationally acclaimed auteur with (sub- as well as supra-) national funding schemes. At the same time the film uses American-accented English dialogue and Hollywood stars such as Kidman and Lauren Bacall. In its length, its arch rhetoric and its Brechtian deconstruction of illusionist techniques, von Trier's film defiantly champions the traditions of European art cinema, yet its narrative draws on Hollywood genres such as the classical gangster film and the rape-revenge movie.

The choosy reaper

Our increased understanding of the biology of ageing has revived prospects for radical anti‐ageing medicine. Ethicists have often tried to argue against these endeavours, but with little success. Their arguments, which appeal to the natural order, are either circular or self‐defeating. Invoking the invariance of the human condition cuts no ice as rational argument and often turns into an avowedly irrational appeal to the ‘yuk reaction’ that exotic technologies evoke. Does that mean that anti‐mortality technologies are ethically innocuous? Not if we consider the reality of unequal death in today's world, in which differences in longevity highlight the gap between the haves and the have‐nots. Even in affluent societies, in which the basics of food, shelter and medicine are widely available, the grim reaper is very much class conscious. Without returning to the concern for equality that was once the hallmark of the Enlightenment, radical life extension may well add to these existing inequalities, and create more resentment and strife in the future. Many aspects of current biomedical research, especially in the more avant‐garde areas of neuroscience and stem‐cell research, are united under the alluring label ‘regenerative medicine’. These developments fuel legitimate hopes for new treatments of degenerative diseases, which, in an age of increasing longevity, represent the main focal point for prevailing anxieties about ill health and the frailties of old age. But regenerative medicine is often taken more literally to mean rejuvenation—a genuine turning back of the clock—which leads to more florid speculations about massive increases in human lifespan. These futuristic views are often criticized by scientists as daydreams that owe more to science fiction than to a sober appraisal of predictable advances. But they are taken more seriously by a different category of opponents, namely those who condemn these prospects on ethical grounds. For many conservative critics, …

Policing in small town America: Dogs, drunks, disorder, and dysfunction

A handful of researchers examined the activities of law enforcement in rural areas. Much of the research on rural policing activities involved well-constructed ethnographic methodologies including observational studies, case studies, and in-depth interviews. These studies demonstrated that rural police officers faced a number of problems that their urban counterparts did not. Building on this past research, this article reports the results of a content analysis of law enforcement activity in one rural community over a two-year timeframe. In all, 948 police calls as described in one community's published media crime reports were analyzed. Results of the analysis suggested that rural policing requires officers who are trained as generalists and able to respond to an assortment of departmental and social/community needs. Implications are provided.

Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History Amy Hill Shevitz (bio) Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History. By Lee Shai Weissbach. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. x + 436 pp. Many scholars in American Jewish history have anticipated this book eagerly, and it deserves applause from all. Recently, scholars have given increased recognition to the non-New-York Jewish experience, but the [End Page 396] study of non-New-York communities has lagged. Lee Shai Weissbach has opened one of the most important of these avenues of study: Jews in the small towns of the United States. This was a daunting task. As Weissbach points out, though the vast majority of American Jews have lived in cities, the majority of individual communities have been small. The data on these communities are usually fragmentary and/or must be culled from general local histories; institutional records—if they ever existed—are evanescent. This makes Weissbach's achievements in research and analysis particularly impressive. His sample consists of 490 places throughout the United States that in 1927 had, according to the American Jewish Year Book, more than 100, but fewer than 1000, Jews. (In 1878, about 29 percent of American Jews lived in such places; in 1927, about 8 percent.) Though admitting this sample is "to some extent arbitrary" (31), Weissbach gives ample justification. He concentrates on what he calls the "classic era" of the American small town, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American small towns' period of "greatest salience" (7). This overlaps the massive immigration of East European Jews, though Weissbach covers the Central European migration in one chapter, to lay the groundwork. By emphasizing patterns—of settlement, institution-building, family life—he identifies three areas of fundamental difference between the small-town Jewish experience and the urban: occupation, community-building, and Jewish self-definition. First, small-town Jews were distinguished by the way they earned their livings: virtually all were merchants. Central European Jews were an important component of small towns' commercial growth in the mid-nineteenth century. When East European Jews became a significant factor starting in the 1890s, their motivation, too, was business opportunity. Given the vagaries of the entrepreneurial life, small Jewish communities were "in a perpetual state of flux" (71). Although some families might remain in a town for generations, the largest proportion of Jews did not stay even their entire lives. The more successful were likelier to stay, meaning that nearly all small-town Jews were middle-class. Second, in building Jewish community, small-towners faced unique challenges; intra-communal cooperation was much more in evidence than in the Jewish communities of the cities. Jewish institutions were usually organized as soon as more than a handful of Jews was available. Almost all of the subject towns had congregations—an impressive 89 percent in 1927. Some even had two, generally Reform and Orthodox. The synagogue building was the central address for the Jewish community: in fact, Weissbach points out, many "became, perhaps inadvertently, the very kinds of multi-faceted institutions that were being actively promoted [End Page 397] in big cities . . . as 'synagogue centers'" (188). However, less than one-quarter of the communities had full-time rabbis (using 1919 as a sample year). They were forced to find creative alternatives for leadership: itinerant "reverends," rabbis borrowed from neighboring cities, rabbinical students, and knowledgeable local laity. The small-town context also shaped Jewish identity in several ways. Especially noticeable is the much swifter and more complete transformation of traditional East European immigrants. By the 1930s, these immigrants were virtually indistinguishable from the descendants of the Central European migration. Even if in separate congregations, both groups were involved in civic and political activities, even in interfaith events. (By the 1950s, Orthodoxy had disappeared from small towns, usually because the congregations had moved into the Conservative movement.) Also, Jewish separateness was shaped by the reality that in the "sometimes intrusive atmosphere of small town America" (242), each individual Jew was more exposed and likely to be viewed as representative of all Jews. Small-town Jews felt a greater personal need for Jewish communal life than did urbanites, and this reinforced the family feeling...

Paul shambroom face to face with the bomb

Face-To-Face With the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War, Photographs by Paul Shambroom. Introduction by Richard Rhodes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. The following dialogue is a distillation of conversations between Paul Shambroom and the author about Shambroom's project and book Face-to-Face With the Bomb. Paul Shambroom's next book, dealing with power, Meetings, is due in September 2004. It is the result of Shambroom attending hundreds of small-town America council meetings and photographing the participants with a large format camera to depict the humble practice of local government in a classic, tableaux scale. This latter project was shown at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal last fall; it will be exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles this summer. Paul Shambroom is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Info: http://www.paulshambroomart.com Robert Hirsch: Briefly describe your project. Paul Shambroom: In a fairly encyclopedic fashion, I photographed the U.S. arsenal of nuclear strategic weapons that were deployed at the end of the Cold War. Around 1990 I began a long and tedious access and research process that continued for the 10 plus years of the project. It involved a Christo-like interest in process and negotiation with the military. I had letters of recommendations from my congressional delegation, but none of this would have happened without the cooperation of the top public affairs officials of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and the Pentagon. I was allowed to photograph bombers, missiles, submarines, warheads, and associated facilities throughout the U.S.A. Since 1992 I made 35 visits to more than two-dozen weapons and command sites (plus hundreds of individual ICBM silos) in 16 states. How did this project come about? It's been an interest of mine to explore the different manifestations of power. Previously I did several series on hidden places of power such as corporate offices, factories, and police stations. I've always been interested in politics and like many other photographers I wanted to show things that had not been seen before. Nuclear power was an extension of this work--the ultimate in power and as a professional challenge to show what was unseen. What lead you down this path? My father was in the U.S. Navy and visited Nagasaki 8 months after the atomic bomb was dropped there, but I was not aware of that at the time I embarked upon this project. It really stems from my experience of growing up at the height of the Cold War and thinking about it a lot and imagining what I would do if there was a nuclear war. Would I go down into a shelter? I told my friends that I would stand outside and watch the inside of my eyeballs melt. Of course that was a juvenile, rebellious response that went along with a total package of rejecting the older generations values, but it did indicate the powerlessness I felt about this life and death situation, and the madness of planning to survive an all out nuclear war. What motivated you to make these photographs? The core reason was to confront the bogeyman, which was the psychological presence of nuclear weapons, the fear of a terrifying invisible thing. I worked with the notion that these things do not have to be invisible. These are real things and if I made the effort, it might be possible to photograph them. For me the nuclear bogeyman was being led down a long hall of our grade school, having to get down on our knees in front of our lockers, putting our hands over our heads, and hearing the sound of the bomb doors closing. It was part of emotional environment of that time. In the fifth grade I wrote what I considered to be a sarcastic, wise guy poem that also contained a modicum of truth: Look up in the sky. See the pretty mushroom cloud. Soon we will be dead. Since then I have come to learn that the intention of civil defense procedures was not really to protect people, but to convince the then Soviet Union that we meant business and were equipping our population to survive. …

A Research Approach for Tracking Local Economic Conditions in Small-Town America

This article describes a practical, low-cost research approach for tracking economic conditions in a small community. The federal government and even some state and large city governments have already addressed this issue with national and regional economic forecasts. But what about the fate of small, isolated metropolitan areas? National and regional forecasts that provide information of a macro nature do not contain data relevant to businesses in a small community. This article describes an approach used in a small Pennsylvania community that has employed a longitudinal study of local economic conditions extending over the past 8 years. The information obtained from this study has proven beneficial to local businesses, economic development agencies, elected officials, and others who are involved in improving the economic health of the community. The approach is technically and financially within reach of local organizations with modest research budgets and can be adapted readily to help other small communities.

Consuming the West

Main Street, USA is the corridor to the Disneyland parks, whether in Los Angeles, Paris, Florida, or Tokyo. Main Street offers the appearance of a public space, with architectural references to civic institutions, but is a bounded and privatized site, which requires an entrance fee. Main Street offers a nostalgic construction of early twentieth century American small-town life. It is also the space in the theme parks that is most dedicated to consumption. Main Street is an idealized urban landscape that has not stopped at the theme park; the Disney owned town, “Celebration,” in Florida is organized around the same nostalgic wish for an urban context that offers itself as both traditional and modern. Main Street offers a version of America frozen at a point of late nineteenth century modernity; it presents a mythical reconciliation of past and future, ecology and consumption, and the local and the global in its simulacrum of a small-town America which could never have existed, but which can be endlessly reproduced across the globe.

America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915

Since the 1990s, the “new urbanism” has revitalized the image of “smalltown America” in many planning discussions. While Florida's Seaside and Celebration seem literally Disney fied and may evoke new segregations by race and class, “neotraditionalism” also speaks to quests for community and order in innercity neighborhoods. Some have challenged such nostalgia, noting that Main Street was a Sinclair Lewis dilemma before it became a theme park; hence, the need for cogent historical analysis of smalltown experiences remains compelling. This is especially true of black towns, whether southern (such as Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville) or settlements built by black exodusters in the Midwest and West. There, community and autonomy were nourished but tested in ways that recast neotradi tional issues today. At the same time, such black communities faced continual pressures of race and class: Eatonville and Celebration share their state with the site of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where white vig ilantes ravaged another black town.

Loose Connections: Joining Together in America's Fragmented Communities

Introduction Breaking Apart, Coming Together The Changing Meanings of Involvement Porous Institutions Saving the Suburbs Against the Odds in the Inner City Surviving in Small-Town America The Good Citizen The Question of Trust The Larger Picture Methods Notes Index

Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America. Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith. University of California Press, 1999. 279 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $16.95

Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America. Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith. University of California Press, 1999. 279 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $16.95

Community and subcommunity in small-town America, 1880–1950

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Jewish population was heavily concentrated in the large and mid-size cities of the United States. At the same time, however, tens of thousands of Jews lived in America's smaller cities and towns as well. This essay examines how some of the basic features of Jewish life in the immigrant era were manifested in America's less visible Jewish centers. It discusses the nature of East European Jewish culture in small towns, and demonstrates that factors such as kinship, residential and occupational patterns, the use of Yiddish, and local institutional frameworks all promoted more highly integrated and intensively Jewish ethnic communities than might have been expected in small-town America. The essay also examines the relationship between German Jews and East Europeans in small towns and considers various other aspects of communal dynamics. In doing so, it describes how in some places a kind of cooperation and creative compromise developed that did not emerge in larger communities, and it reveals how in other places communal divisions persisted despite environmental factors that should have promoted their moderation. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that the communities of America's smaller cities and towns in the decades before World War II were not simply miniature versions of the communities of larger metropolitan areas, and it suggests that for those interested in the dynamics of Jewish communal life, smaller Jewish settlements can provide valuable laboratories in which to study the role of place in conditioning the American Jewish experience.

Review: Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, by Richard Davies

Review: <i>Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America</i>, by Richard Davies

Richard O. Davies. &lt;italic&gt;Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America&lt;/italic&gt;. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 234. Cloth $39.95, paper $20.00

Journal Article Richard O. Davies. Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 234. Cloth $39.95, paper $20.00 Get access Davies Richard O.. Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 234. Cloth $39.95, paper $20.00. Joseph A. Amato Joseph A. Amato Southwest State University, Marshall, Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 1, February 2000, Pages 236–237, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.1.236 Published: 01 February 2000

Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America

Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America

Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls

Dave Etter: Fishing for Our Lost American Souls David R. Pichaske (bio) In critiquing the 1991 Heath Anthology of American Literature, Hershel Parker, himself an editor of the competing Norton Anthology of American Literature, suggested that many Heath contributors “seem to have gone hunting not to discover what good literature had been written in the United States but only to locate minority (including women) writers who had been absent from or poorly represented in previous anthologies.” In so doing, he observed, they neglected several significant genres, ethnicities, and geographies, particularly the South, but also the West and the Midwest. “The Heath advertising makes its highest claims for the diversity of the anthology,” Parker noted, “but diversity is just what I miss in it.”1 The dissatisfaction of one version of the American canon with a succeeding version of that canon is an old story, but Parker is correct in saying that 1980s reconstructionists wrote off “vast numbers of American writers,” including many of those who in their own times had been the most popular or the most respected, “the ones who had seemed to speak with truly American voices.” In fixating on race, class, gender, and sexual preference—which have become significant literary considerations—most critics ignored or underplayed age, religion, ethnicity (too often conflated with race), and region (both geographical locality and significant urban/suburban/rural distinctions). Insofar as the reconstruction sought a fuller understanding of American Literature through heightened awareness of cultural determinants, its reassessment remains, for these reasons, incomplete. Harsher readings accuse reconstructionists of replacing an edifice of considerable grace and coherence with something of a shambles. An even harsher interpretation is that the reconstruction was driven less by a quest after Truth than by such late capitalist market considerations as publication, promotion, and book sales.2 [End Page 393] In the junkbond market of literary, scholarly, and textbook publication, the South, the West, and the rural Midwest lag somewhat behind. Historically, they always have, and here is another old story: the neglect of regionalists (usually dismissed as “local color writers”) by the credentialed custodians of American literary culture. Polarities in this running debate are multiple and varied: native opposed to international or European traditions; philosopher- academics opposed to journalists, gentleman farmers and steamboat captains; the New York cultural arbiters against the rest of the country. But if literature is culturally determined, and the proper work of literary scholars is to examine the full range of cultural determinants, then their province is indeed the full range of American culture, including the tradition of Midwest village writers, from Twain and Eggleston and Garland to Anderson and Lewis and Lindsay and Masters to Lockridge and Bissell.3 This tradition, relatively prominent in earlier versions of the canon, has largely disappeared from the national academic consciousness. One hears little these days about “the Chicago Renaissance” or “the Revolt from the Village.” Twain and Anderson remain, diminished, refocused, Anderson represented in the current one-volume Norton by two stories: “Mother” and “Queer.” Later rural Midwesterners, especially writers of the 1980s and 1990s, became virtually invisible, including such women as Sue Hubbell, Carol Bly, Kathleen Norris, Linda Hasselstrom, and Jane Smiley. One of the more marginalized voices in adademia today is that of living male poets from the rural Midwest, including Robert Bly, who is usually relegated to the men’s movement. Not a single Anglo male poet born after 1930 appeared in the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Many names come to mind: William Kloefkorn, John Knoepfle, and Dave Etter, formerly of Elburn, now of Lanark, Illinois. In the 1970s and 1980s, Etter emerged as one of the Midwest’s premier poets. He won both Midland Authors and Carl Sandburg awards; his poems were reprinted in over one hundred anthologies and in eight foreign countries, including translations in German, Japanese, and Polish; his great work, Alliance, Illinois, endorsed by Raymond Carver as “hands down the most impressive long work of poetry I’ve read in years,” found its place among Winesburg, Main Street, Main-Travelled Roads, and Lake Wobegon Days in an essay on the literature of small town America written by an Austrian scholar and published...

Storm Center: a discursive approach to constructions of library workers

The film Storm Center was released in 1956, featuring Bette Davis as a librarian in small town America. The narrative is a parable of anti‐communism in the McCarthy era where the town council tries to remove a book on communism from the library. The librarian opposes this and is fired. The details and consequences provide a rich framework for a discursive approach to the text. A discursive approach is chosen because of the film’s extensive use of thematic oppositions around the central concern of censorship and freedom of information. A number of discourses are briefly explored including: femininity; the individual and the group; emotion and scientific rationalism. Concludes that qualitative work in library and information studies might benefit by considering the type of questions posed by discourse theory, as outlined here.

Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America.

Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America.