Word: middletowners
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...decided that Muncie was "the typical American city" that could reveal how small-town America had developed and where it was going. The Lynds trained themselves in anthropological methods and descended on Muncie as if it were a settlement of New Guinea headhunters. The result was two classic books, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), that shrewdly foreshadowed the next two generations of American life...
...institutional habits, and the other foot fast to an escalator erratically moving in several directions at a bewildering variety of speeds." Now a new team of sociologists headed by Theodore Caplow of the University of Virginia has moved in on Muncie to update the Lynds with a study titled Middletown III. Though not yet complete, the new study finds that Muncie has not changed much since the Lynds: it still has one foot on the escalator, the other planted firmly in the 1890s...
...Lynds (he died in 1970, she is retired) found a work-oriented town where "getting on" was important, as were self-reliance, civic pride, patriotism and Christian fervor. So did the Middletown III researchers of today. Caplow and Teammate Howard Bahr of Brigham Young University asked Muncie high school students of 1977 the same public opinion questions the Lynds asked 1924 students, and got much the same answers. Last year 50% of the students agreed that "the Bible is a sufficient guide to all problems of modern life," 78% said the U.S. is "unquestionably the best country in the world...
...Middletown III researchers, working on a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are still two years away from presenting a final report. Their central finding, however, seems clear: almost all the social forces shaping life in modern-day Muncie were already present in 1924. It amounts to a startling message about the nation: that American life has not changed very much in 50 years -or at least the kind of American life lived in a town like Muncie. The Lynds, describing the wrenching dislocations that propelled America from a somnolent agrarianism to a modern industrialism, said that...
...drawing women into the labor force, but reported that females were shunted into traditional "women's jobs" or paid factory wages way below those paid to men. The Lynds warned that over half of Muncie girls "were busily acquiring habits of money dependence [on men] that characterize Middletown wives." Though the Lynds reported that brains were considered unimportant in a Muncie woman, by the time of their second book, Munsonians had dropped their opposition to working women and had begun to educate girls for good jobs. Now, says a member of the Middletown III team, C. Bradford Chappell...