Description
Book SynopsisPublished in 1929, Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd''s Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture was destined to become a sociological point of reference for the quality of life in an average American town in the 1920s. Their Middletown in Transition, a 1937 restudy of the same communitynow known to be Muncie, Indianaprovided a second point of reference on community values in the midst of the great American depression. Achieving the status of cultural benchmarks, these two books have generated an enormous secondary literature on Muncie/Middletown, including a two-volume restudy by Theodore Caplow, published in the 1980s, and a series of six documentary films.
Back to Middletown differs from the numerous other investigations and analyses of one of the most famous community studies in the history of sociology. The author, an Italian sociologist, examines the complete Middletown saga through the distinctive lens of an outsider, tracing the character an
Trade Review
"The Lynds' works became sociological classics . . . and gave rise to a subgenre of sociology called Munciology. In this volume, Caccamo reanalyzes the Lynds' findings and reports on her extended visit to Muncie in the late 1980s. She is an objective observer truly distanced from the cultural and religious biases that tainted the initial works. This almost anthropological study of Muncie is an excellent companion to the Lynds' works and serves as a great cultural study of small-town America in the late twentieth century."—Library Journal
"Caccamo birngs to 'the Muncian tribe and its sociological investigators' the fresh perspective of a cosmopolitan European. . . . A graceful, humane, and provocative work, Back to Middletown is a model of scholarship that is also art."—Choice
Table of Contents
1. Robert S. Lynd: portrait of an author; 2. Middletown I: eclipse of the community; 3. Middletown II: what transition?; 4. Muncie and Middletown; 5. Middletown III; the story continues; 6. The nineties in Middletown; Notes; Index.
