Part of Our Lives challenges the conventional idea that public libraries are valuable mostly because they are essential to democracy. Instead, this book uses the voices of generations of public library users to argue that Americans have loved their libraries for the useful information they make accessible; the public spaces they provide; and the commonplace reading materials they supply that help users make sense of the world around them.

In The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South, Wayne and Shirley Wiegand use an array of primary sources to tell the comprehensive history of the integration of public libraries in the region. Like other efforts to integrate civic institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the persistence of local activism that won the battle to integrate these institutions and genuinely make them free to all citizens. The history of that process began before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision, a time when southern blacks attempted only to equalize accommodations, not...