Encyclopedia Americana

Encyclopedia Americana

Encyclopedia Americana is a general encyclopedia currently offered to students via Grolier Online. Formerly printed and bound in book form, Encyclopedia Americana was the first major encyclopedia to be published in the United States.

History[edit]

Franz Lieber (aka Francis Lieber; ca. 1800-1872) was a German-American jurist and political philosopher whose chief claim to fame was the creation of the Code for the Government of Armies in the Field (1863)^[1], a set of rules of conduct in use during the American Civil War, as well as a foundation for the Geneva Conventions. Lieber was also an educator and writer, and it was he who conceived of the idea of a translation into English of the German work Konversations-Lexikon, which was an early edition of what would be later called the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. This first edition of the 13-volume Encyclopedia Americana was published in 1833, and went through several editions until 1858. A second, and possibly unrelated work with the same name, was released 1883-1889 by publisher Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who would game some reputation for his Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in the late 19th century, and his New Science Review.

Frederick Converse Beach (1848-1918), an American photographer and publishing editor, took the next major step. As the director of Scientific American, he assembled a team of several hundred editors and scholars to compile and publish a new 16-volume version of Americana in 1902, which eventually received a major revision to 30 volumes in 1918, which it held during the remaining years of it publication history. Grolier, a rival publishing company with its own encyclopedias, acquired the rights to Americana in 1948, and in turn Grolier would be sold to Scholastic in 2000. With the advent of the internet as a tool for research and learning, the sales of printed encyclopedias began to wane, which was especially true with the creation of Wikipedia in 2001. Encyclopedia Americana's final print edition was released in 2006.

Structure[edit]

Like other similar works, Encyclopedia Americana was arranged in an alphabetical format, but not in individual volumes specific to a letter, such as in World Book; this arrangement kept each volume uniform in size. It was also supplemented by annual year books, which were titled the Americana Annual. The books were presented in either classic or contemporary bindings, with the images of the arms of the United States or a stylized oil lamp stamped onto the front cover and spine, depending on the binding and year of publication. In sheer size alone Americana rivals its major competitor, Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the largest bound and printed book sets in North America; the last edition of 2006 contained in excess of 45,000 articles written by 6,500 contributors, and has a bibliography of over 9,000 titles.

Most of the articles are signed, with the additional adage of the author's credentials accompanying the name; in this respect it differs from Collier's Encyclopedia in dispensing with a listing of all authors within the preface. Like Collier's and Britannica, the contributors are experts within their fields of study or captains of industry, with many of them bearing a master's degree or higher. Many articles go into great detail, with some containing a count of several hundred thousand words; very few articles are five hundred words or less.

References[edit]