Carnegie Library

Front and back entrances of the Carnegie Library

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Carnegie Library (CA)
301. E. Jackson St.
Muncie, IN 47305

(765) 747-8208

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About Carnegie Library

Located in Downtown Muncie, the historic Carnegie Library is a specialty library that houses the Local History & Genealogy collection. Carnegie Library also provides free public access computer use, free Wi-Fi, low-cost printing and copying, free programs on a variety of subjects, and community meeting space. Carnegie Library was built in 1902 and opened to the public in 1904. It has been in continuous use as a library since its opening and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Muncie Public Library strives to provide services, collections, and spaces to everyone in a welcoming, accessible environment. To request reasonable accommodations to participate in a program, fill out a Disability Accomodation Request form at least one week in advance.

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BookPage

BookPage is an independently published recommendation guide for readers, highlighting the best new books across all genres as chosen by BookPage editors. Pick up a free copy at the library or MITSbus station each month while supplies last, or subscribe to the free newsletter.

Local History & Genealogy Collection Spotlight

Image for "A Field Guide to American Houses"

A Field Guide to American Houses

Here at last: the fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture--in print since its publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential reference to American houses.

Focusing on dwellings in urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural locations all across the continental United States--houses built over the past three hundred years reflecting every social and economic background--this guide provides in-depth information on the essentials of domestic architecture with facts and frames of reference that will enable you to look in a fresh way at the houses around you. With more than 1,600 detailed photographs and line illustrations, and a lucid, vastly informative text, it will teach you not only to recognize distinct architectural styles but also to understand their historical significance. What does that cornice signify? Or that porch? The shape of that door? The window treatment? When was this house built? What does the style say about its builders and their eras? You'll find the answers to these and myriad other questions in this encyclopedic and eminently practical book.

Here are more than fifty styles and their variants, spanning seven distinct historical periods. Each style is illustrated with a large schematic drawing that highlights its most important identifying features. Additional drawings and photographs provide, at a glance, common alternative shapes, principal subtypes, and close-up views of typical small details--windows, doors, cornices, etc.--that can be difficult to see in full-house illustrations. The accompanying text explains the identifying features of each style, describing where and in what quantity they can be found, discussing all of its notable variants, and tracing their origin and history.

The book's introductory chapters provide invaluable general discussions of construction materials and techniques, house shapes, and the various traditions of architectural fashion that have influenced American house design through the past three centuries. A pictorial key and glossary simplifies identification, connecting easily recognized architectural features--the presence of a tile roof, for example--to the styles in which that feature is likely to be found.

Among the new material included in this edition are chapters on styles that have emerged in the thirty years since the previous edition; a groundbreaking chapter on the development and evolution of American neighborhoods; an appendix on approaches to construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings throughout.

Here is an indispensable resource--both easy and pleasurable to use--for the house lover and the curious tourist, for the house buyer and the weekend stroller, for neighborhood preservation groups, architecture buffs, and everyone who wants to know more about their own homes and communities. It is an invaluable book of American architecture, culture, and history.

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Notable American Indians

 

 

Due primarily to a lack of accurate data, little has been written regarding the life histories of individual American Indians.

 

Biographical Indian sketches that have been published are about a few outstanding individuals, mainly leaders in warfare, such as Tecumseh, Weyapiersenwah or Blue Jacket, and Meshekinnoquah or Little Turtle.

 

The authors of this volume have compiled a broad range of biographical data and have woven them into rewarding personal stories about Indian leaders of the lower Midwest (1700-1850) that will engage the reader's attention.

 

In this book, the reader will discover what life was like for thirty-one notable American Indians of the Miami, Potawatomi Shawnee and Delaware tribes.

 

Many of these notables include renowned warriors and patriots of the Indian cause during the 18th and 19th centuries however, several individuals are peace chiefs and religious leaders, women and white captives. For many of these subjects, their lives were interwoven with each other.

 

In the gathering of this book, the authors have pored over letters, diaries, reports, books and internet and have traveled around the Midwest researching historical society archives, libraries and historic sites.

 

Accompanying the biographies are individual pen and ink drawings that add visual interest to the pages.

 

The authors write with a concerned passion about the historic Indian subjects they selected from the history pages of an earlier time.

 

The reader of American Indian history will profoundly benefit from this biographical compilation that is highly readable and informative.