Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries brought the Enlightenment to America-an intellectual revolution that laid the foundation for the political one that followed. With the “first Drudgery” of settling the American colonies now past, Franklin announced in 1743, it was time the colonists set about improving the lot of humankind through collaborative inquiry. From Franklin's idea emerged the American Philosophical Society, an association hosted in Philadelphia and dedicated to the harnessing of man's intellectual and creative powers for the common good. The animus behind the society was and is a disarmingly simple one-that the value of knowledge is directly proportional to its utility. This straightforward idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself-and through America, on the world as a whole.
From celebrated historian of ideas Jonathan Lyons comes The Society for Useful Knowledge, telling the story of America's coming-of-age through its historic love affair with practical invention, applied science, and self-reliance. Offering fresh insights into such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the inimitable, endlessly inventive Franklin, Lyons gives us a vital new perspective on the American founding. He illustrates how the movement for useful knowledge is key to understanding the flow of American society and culture from colonial times to the present day.
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Jonathan Lyons is the author of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Bloomsbury Press, 2009). He served as editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters for more than twenty years. He holds a doctorate in sociology, and has taught at George Mason University, Georgetown University, and Monash University in Australia. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
While the colonies were securing political separation from England, a group of Americans were instrumental in establishing American intellectual and scientific freedom from European tradition and in developing a vibrant and distinctly practical culture for the new nation. The leading proponents of this independence were the remarkable Benjamin Franklin and his associates (the Junto), including botanist John Bartram, astronomer David Rittenhouse, physician Benjamin Rush, and industrial visionary Tench Coxe. In this highly readable account of the societies (the title one, later the American Philosophical Society, being the prototype), academies, mechanics’ associations, and other social institutions the group engendered that believed science and experimentation to be collective endeavors, Lyons illuminates a formative period in American cultural history, the theme being that “the value of learning and knowledge . . . is directly proportional to its practical import and utility.” While this emphasis originated with early colonists’ need to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, Lyons’ focus on Franklin and Quaker Philadelphia is apt, though he rightly credits an English precedent with the Royal Society. The book will be compared to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), which covered a comparably germinal group a century later. --Mark Levine
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Softcover. Condition: Good. Reprint. Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries brought the Enlightenment to America-an intellectual revolution that laid the foundation for the political one that followed. With the first Drudgery of settling the American colonies now past, Franklin announced in 1743, it was time the colonists set about improving the lot of humankind through collaborative inquiry. From Franklin's idea emerged the American Philosophical Society, an association hosted in Philadelphia and dedicated to the harnessing of man's intellectual and creative powers for the common good. The animus behind the society was and is a disarmingly simple one-that the value of knowledge is directly proportional to its utility. This straightforward idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself-and through America, on the world as a whole.From celebrated historian of ideas Jonathan Lyons comes The Society for Useful Knowledge, telling the story of America's coming-of-age through its historic love affair with practical invention, applied science, and self-reliance. Offering fresh insights into such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the inimitable, endlessly inventive Franklin, Lyons gives us a vital new perspective on the American founding. He illustrates how the movement for useful knowledge is key to understanding the flow of American society and culture from colonial times to the present day. Seller Inventory # SONG1608195724
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