Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States Book

List of Illustrations     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction   Thomas Augst     1
Social Libraries and Library Societies in Eighteenth-Century North America   James Raven     24
Subscription Libraries and Commercial Circulating Libraries in Colonial Philadelphia and New York   James Green     53
A Great and Natural Enemy of Democracy? Politics and Culture in the Antebellum Portsmouth Athenaeum   Michael A. Baenen     72
"An Association of Kindred Spirits": Black Readers and Their Reading Rooms   Elizabeth McHenry     99
Boston Library Catalogues, 1850-1875: Female Labor and Technological Change   Barbara A. Mitchell     119
Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion   Thomas Augst     148
Domesticating Spain: 1898 and the Hispanic Society of America   Elizabeth Amann     184
Women Writers and Their Libraries in the 1920s   Karin Roffman     203
The Library as Place, Collection, or Service: Promoting Book Circulation in Durham, North Carolina, and at the Book-of-the-Month Club, 1925-1945   Janice Radway     231
Blood and Thunder on the Bookmobile: American Public Libraries and the Construction of "the Reader," 1950-1995   Christine Pawley     264
Toward a New Cultural Design: The American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and Libraries in the 1930s   Kenneth Carpenter     283
Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era   Roy Rosenzweig     310
Notes on Contributors     343
Index     345