History of the Center

Ball State capitalized on the attention generated within the academic community on "Muncie as Middletown" by establishing the Center for Middletown Studies in 1980. Dwight W. Hoover, professor of history and a recognized scholar in the fields of social and intellectual history, was the founding director.

Under Hoover's guidance, the center continued to expand and became an established academic unit within the university in 1984. Hoover retired in 1991, and E. Bruce Geelhoed, professor of history and a specialist in American business history, became the center's director. At the beginning of the 2005 academic year, James Connolly succeeded Geelhoed as director.

Over the past quarter century, the center has sponsored a wide range of research. It assisted scholars conducting the "Middletown IV" research project, the most recent replication of the Lynd's study. That work generated numerous publications, most notably The First Measured Century (2001) by Theodore Caplow, Lewis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenburg, and its accompanying PBS broadcast series. Other recent center supported publications include Dan Rotenburg ed., Middletown Jews: The Tenuous Survival of an American Jewish Community (1997) and the award-winning The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community (2004) by Eric Lassiter et al.

In recent years, the center has broadened its research agenda and begun to use emerging media to disseminate Middletown research and archival material. Taking a cue for the original conception of the Lynds’ book as a “small city study,” the center sponsors a regular conference and publication series on the history and contemporary experiences of second- and third-tier cities around the world.

Its Documenting Deindustrialization initiative aims to develop online resources, including oral histories, photographs, scholarly studies, and policy analyses examining economic change and its consequences in Muncie and the Midwest since 1950. It has also embarked on an ambitious project, What Middletown Read, funded with a major grant from the National Endowment to the Humanities, which will create an online database detailing library patronage and reading habits in Muncie between 1892 and 1902. This research is based on a collection of Muncie Public Library records that document every book checked out by every patron for most of a 10-year period.