Category Archives: Public library history

On the afternoon of July 16, 1960, eight African-American students bravely filed into the whites-only Greenville County (S.C.) Public Library and sat down in the reading room to look at newspapers and books. One of those students was a young … Continue reading →

Read the full article here, “Desegregating Libraries in the American South” Forgotten heroes in civil rights history” by Wayne A. Wiegand in American Libraries. At 11 a.m. on March 27, 1961, nine students from the historically black Tougaloo College walked … Continue reading →

Growing up, Clementine spent much of his teenage years at the library, which became his sanctuary. He was taken by the writing of William Blake and Immanuel Kant, and was particularly interested in the work of the 17th-century philosopher John … Continue reading →

From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:. After promoting women’s groups in West Bengal as a route to development a West Bengali woman asked Lant Pritchett: You all are from countries that are much richer and doing much better than our … Continue reading →

I was skimming a fun book by library historian David Kaser Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience where he suggests that in 1860 American men were pretty much 90% literate and books had become incredibly … Continue reading →