Wayne A. Wiegand: Main Street Public Libraries: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2011, 244 pp, Hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-60938067-0

摘要

Library historian Wayne A. Wiegand's latest book, Main Street Public Libraries: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956, explores the development and collections of four midwestern libraries: the Bryant Library in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the Sage Public Library in Osage, Iowa, the Charles H. Moore Library in Lexington, Michigan, and the Rhinelander Public Library in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. All of these communities were founded by "Republican Protestant Yankees" and "were home to tidy, stable, and largely homogenous populations [with] shared cultural values" (2). All are also within distance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Wiegand worked while writing this book.