Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America

Pethers, Matthew

Abstract

This article examines the history of encyclopedias in North America and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to foreground wider shifts in knowledge formation and organization caused by a growing perception of information overload. Tracing the Enlightenment manifestations of this concept, which is more typically seen as characteristic of twenty-first century digital culture, the article considers how attempts by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith to establish an intellectual model of the division of labor in Scotland migrated to and were reworked in the early United States. This transition is explored through analysis of the Philadelphian publisher Thomas Dobson's Encyclopaedia; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature (1788–98), which reprinted and added to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1787–97). Dobson's Encyclopaedia is situated in the context of: older traditions of synoptic writing practiced by figures like Cotton Mather, which retained a belief in the possibility of all-encompassing knowledge collection; emerging experiments by eighteenth-century encyclopedia makers with presentation and structure, designed to better order complex bodies of information and accommodate new data; and current debates around information democracy and management centered on Wikipedia, which indicate key points of change and continuity in the extended history of the encyclopedia form's struggle to be both comprehensive and up-to-date.

Citation

Pethers, M. (2024). Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America. Early American Studies, 22(4), 562-612. https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2024.a942215

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 9, 2023
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 30, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 2, 2025
• Journal: Early American Studies
• Print ISSN: 1543-4273
• Electronic ISSN: 1559-0895
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 562-612
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2024.a942215
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/26795229
• Publisher URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/942215
• Additional Information: All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112