Here comes the bookmobile: Public culture and the shape of belonging

Attig, Derek

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49657 Copy

Description

Title

Here comes the bookmobile: Public culture and the shape of belonging

Author(s)

Attig, Derek

Issue Date

2014-05-30T17:03:17Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Oberdeck, Kathryn

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Oberdeck, Kathryn J.

Committee Member(s)

• Chaplin, Tamara
• Hoganson, Kristin L.
• Fouché, Rayvon
• Newcomb, Lori H.

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• bookmobiles
• libraries
• library history
• book history
• American Studies
• cultural history
• print culture
• community
• twentieth-century history
• cultural geography
• public space

Abstract

This dissertation explores the peculiar history of the bookmobile in the United States from the close of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In the process, it insists that a spatial politics of shared information was key to constructing and contesting community in twentieth-century America. Grounded in cultural geography, American Studies, and book history, it is an interdisciplinary investigation of the roles that bookmobiles played in efforts to build what some reformers called “common consciousness,” a sense of cultural and spiritual connection. Indeed, the bookmobile emerged not just as a tool for getting books into far-flung hands but also as a way to confront two persistent questions: What should our communities look like in this new century, and who should be included in them? This dissertation argues that the bookmobile’s answers to those questions both shaped and were shaped by three factors—racial segregation, imperial expansion, and consumer capitalism—that ultimately exposed the limits of the dream of a common consciousness. Drawing on research in archival and published sources, this dissertation looks at a series of moments when bookmobiles, by moving purportedly public culture through supposedly shared space, forced Americans to consider what it would mean to hold ideas and objects in common. A set of five thematically distinct and roughly chronological chapters allows the dissertation to touch down in particular times in particular places—in Progressive-Era Kansas, in the Jim Crow South, in New Deal New Mexico and Cold War West Germany, in suburban supermarkets, and in Silicon Valley—while offering an expansive view of the relationship between community, space, and culture in America.

Graduation Semester

2014-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49657

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Derek Attig

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