Muncie, Indiana, remains the epitome of an American town. Yet scholars built the image of so-called typical communities across the United States on an illusion. Their decades of studies ignored the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity and tensions woven into the American communities that Muncie supposedly embodied. Himanee Gupta-Carlson puts forth an essential question: what do nonwhites, non-Christians, and/or non-natives mean when they call themselves American? A daughter in one of Muncie's first Indian American families, Gupta-Carlson merges personal experience, the life histories of others, and critical analysis to explore the answers. Her stories of members of Muncie's South Asian communities unearth the silences imposed by past studies while challenging the body of scholarship in fundamental ways. At the same time, Gupta-Carlson shares personal memories and experiences that illuminate her place within the historical, political, and socio-cultural currents she engages in her work. It also reveals how that work informs and transforms her as a scholar and a person. As meditative as it is insightful, Muncie, India(na) invites readers to feel the truth of the fascinating stories behind one woman's revised portrait of an American community.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication, and many of the postcards produced during this "golden age" can today be considered works of art. Postcard photographers traveled the length and breadth of the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in general stores across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in America's history. This fascinating new history of Muncie, Indiana, showcases more than two hundred of the best vintage postcards available.

On a warm night in September 1985, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in Westside Park in Muncie, Indiana. Their killer has never been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee. The case grew cold. Only decades later did a dogged police investigator narrow the scope to a suspect whose name has never been publicly revealed until now. Keith Roysdon and Douglas Walker, authors of Wicked Muncie and Muncie Murder & Mayhem, have followed the investigation into the Westside Park murders for decades and, for the first time, report the complete and untold story.

Explore the notorious and unusual side of Muncie's history. Muncie is the classic small American city. But for much of the past two centuries, the city fell victim to murder, corruption and the bizarre. Mayor Rollin Bunch went to prison for mail fraud, while his police commissioner faced a murder rap. Viola "Babe" Swartz ran a brothel out of a truck stop that was raided by police at least a dozen times but ran for sheriff in the 1974 primary election. June Holland, of the locally famous Holland triplets, killed her neighbor for refusing to sell her house.

The Muncie 4-speeds, M20, M21, and M22 are some of the most popular manual transmissions ever made and continue to be incredibly popular. The Muncie was the top high-performance manual transmission GM offered in its muscle cars of the 60s and early 70s. It was installed in the Camaro, Chevelle, Buick GS, Pontiac GTO, Olds Cutlass, and many other classic cars. Many owners want to retain the original transmission in their classic cars to maintain its value. Transmission expert and veteran author Paul Cangialosi has created an indispensible reference to Muncie 4-speeds that guides you through each crucial stage of the rebuild process. Comprehensive ID information is provided, so you can positively identify the cases, shafts, and related parts. It discusses available models, parts options, and gearbox cases. Most important, it shows how to completely disassemble the gearbox, identify wear and damage, select the best parts, and complete the rebuild. It also explains how to choose the ideal gear ratio for a particular application. Various high-performance and racing setups are also shown, including essential modifications, gun drilling the shafts, cutting down the gears to remove weight, and achieving race-specific clearances. Muncie 4-speeds need rebuilding after many miles of service and extreme use. In addition, when a muscle car owner builds a high-performance engine that far exceeds stock horsepower, a stronger high-performance transmission must be built to accommodate this torque and horsepower increase. No other book goes into this much detail on the identification of the Muncie 4-speed, available parts, selection of gear ratios, and the rebuild process.

"Muncie epitomizes the small-town America of squeaky-clean 1950s sitcoms, but its wholesome veneer conceals a violent past. Public scandals and personal tragedy dogged the long, notorious life of Dr. Jules LaDuron. Baseball ace Obie McCracken met a tragic and violent end after joining the police force. A mother's love could not stop James Hedges from committing murder. The paranoid delusions of Leonard Redden hounded him until one day he carried a shotgun into a quiet classroom. Detectives Melvin Miller and Ambrose Settles chased a murderer across county lines in pursuit of justice. And newsman George Dale's showdown with the Klan prepared him for the political fight of his life. Douglas Walker and Keith Roysdon, authors of Wicked Muncie, introduce a new cast of characters from the city's notorious past." --Publisher description.

Prompted by the overt omission of Muncie's black community from the famous study by Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, the authors uncover the neglected part of the story of Middletown, a well-known pseudonym for the Midwestern city of Muncie, Indiana. It is a uniquely collaborative field study involving local experts, ethnographers, and teams of college students. The book, The Other Side of Middletown, and DVD, Middletown Redux, are valuable resources for community research. Sponsored by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, Muncie, Indiana.

Commemorating the centennial of women receiving the right to vote in the United States in 1920, "We Must Be Fearless": The Woman Suffrage Movement in Indiana by historian Anita Morgan examines the struggles and triumphs of a myriad of Hoosier women-black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural-who banded together to seek equal rights with men at the ballot box. The story of the Indiana women's suffrage movement can be divided into three stages. The first began with the first woman's rights association meeting in 1851 and ended in 1869. Hoosier women held yearly meetings and agreed upon basic goals that included not only suffrage, but also equal pay for equal work, changes to married women's property laws, and greater employment opportunities and access to the professions. Most members of this early group put their efforts aside during the Civil War to devote their time to nursing and other war work. The exception to this was Lizzie Bunnell, who published The Mayflower from her home in Peru, Indiana. Bunnell's bi-monthly newspaper supported both the Union and woman's rights and is believed to be the only woman's rights newspaper published during the war. Following the Civil War, the fight for woman's rights resumed, but with a new, almost singular focus on suffrage. This second phase of woman's suffrage work in Indiana began in 1869 when the Indiana Woman's Rights Association reformed with a new name-the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association. The association aligned itself with Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association, a national group that focused more on gaining the vote and less on social issues than the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The Indianapolis-based Equal Suffrage Society joined the fight in 1878. The combined power of these groups pushed the Indiana General Assembly to the brink of woman suffrage in 1881-83, but in the end the fear that women would vote as one in favor of temperance legislation got in the way of the passage of the state woman's suffrage amendment. The final phase of the suffrage movement in Indiana started with the 1890s as many Hoosier women worked with national women's groups or worked on local and state progressive reforms aside from or in addition to their work on suffrage. After sporadic failed attempts to push through suffrage in this era, the joint efforts of the Woman's Franchise League and the nonpartisan Legislative Council of Indiana Women, combined with a strong and growing acceptance of woman's suffrage at the national level (in part as a result of women's work during World War I), once again pushed Indiana to the brink of woman's suffrage. The Indiana legislature passed the Woman's Suffrage Act of 1917, which gave women partial suffrage in the November elections that year and passed the first reading of the Beardsley Full Suffrage Amendment. This meant that Indiana women would achieve full suffrage in 1919 if the amendment also passed that legislative session. As women across the state registered to vote, William Knight filed suit against women voting and he won. Hoosier women did not get to vote in the elections that November and had to wait for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to gain full voting rights.