Institutionalizing the Information Revolution: Debates over knowledge institutions in the Early American Republic

The United States was created in the midst of an information revolution. The leaders of the newly created American republic believed the citizens needed to be educated and informed in order to be effective participants in governing the new republic. A participatory government rested its fortune and authority on the expertise of its citizens to obtain and employ useful knowledge To address this issue, George Washington proposed that the country establish a national university that attract men from all parts of the country and educate them at public expense in the national capital. Subsequently, every president from Washington to John Quincy Adams witnessed a debate over how the country could best facilitate the creation and dissemination of knowledge. At the heart of these debates were questions about what constituted the most important forms of information in a republican polity, who should have access to this knowledge, and how--in what institutional form--the information should be disseminated.;This dissertation maintains that the debates over the national university are best understood as part of an ongoing information revolution that emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between 1789 and 1860, American political and intellectual leaders engaged in an ongoing, and often contentious, series of debates over a range of possible "knowledge institutions" that would serve the country. They discussed which kinds of institutions would best serve the public good and whether they should be located in the nation's capital or elsewhere.;These debates began during Washington's presidency with a heated conflict over establishing a national university--an institution which never was approved in the form that Washington had proposed. Subsequently, Thomas Jefferson, while president, sponsored the creation of West Point as a national military academy and in his retirement, oversaw the establishment of the University of Virginia. During the early nineteenth century, other leading Americans began to propose other kinds of knowledge institutions. Charles Willson Peale, among others, spearheaded the movement to found museums that democratized knowledge and created open access to the public. Others founded libraries and learned societies, such as the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, that not only created and collected information but would spread information through lectures, public programs, and exhibits to a wide audience.;Finally, with Englishman James Smithson's 1829 bequest to the United States, political leaders engaged a sustained debate about the creation of another kind of knowledge institution that would be headquartered in Washington, DC. Instead of a national university, they created a scientific institute that aimed to produce highly specialized kinds of knowledge that would lead the country's quest for scientific advances. Such an institution, however, served only a small elite. It took several more decades, but by 1881 the Smithsonian Institution opened its doors to become a museum, which provided access to knowledge to a wide American public. In a form that no one had anticipated, the country finally had its "national university".