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
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.
