Encyclopedia Americana

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 History
2 References
3 See also
4 External links

The Encyclopedia Americana is the second largest printed general encyclopedia in the English language (after the Encyclopædia Britannica). As the name suggests it is produced in the United States and is aimed at the North American market. Thus, its coverage of American and Canadian geography and history is especially strong. It is also notable for the many glossaries it contains. Most articles are signed by their contributors.

As of 2004, the encyclopedia has 45,000 articles containing 25 million words and was written by 6,500 contributors. It includes 9,000 bibliographies, 150,000 cross-references, 1,000+ tables, 1,200 maps, and almost 4,500 black-and-white line art and color images. It also has 680 factboxes.^[1] However, because the work is revised volume-by-volume, some articles are considered to be out of date.

Currently, the encyclopedia is produced by Scholastic Library Publishing, a division of Scholastic Inc and Grolier Inc. An online version, requiring subscription, was introduced in 1997. Americana is aimed at middle school, high school, and college students. It is available to schools and libraries as one of the options in the Grolier Online reference service, which also includes the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, which is designed for middle and high school students, and the New Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia for elementary school students. Grolier Online also offers a Spanish language encyclopedia and specialist reference works on science, lands and peoples, and the states of the United States and Mexico. Grolier Online is not available to individual subscribers.

[edit] History

The Encyclopædia Americana. A popular dictionary of arts, sciences, literature, history, politics and biography, brought down to the present time; including a copious collection of original articles in American biography; on the basis of the 7th ed. of the German Conversations-Lexicon was founded by German-born Francis Lieber. It was the first significant American encyclopedia, and was based on Brockhaus' Conversations-Lexikon, although with significant added and rewritten material. Like that work, it was written in an accessible style and intended for general (rather than scholarly) use.

The first edition comprised 13 volumes and was published between 1829 and 1833 by Carey, Lea & Carey of Philadelphia; in 1846, a supplementary fourteenth volume was issued. Later editions and reprints were published through 1858.

In 1902, a new version in 16 volumes which carried over some of the old material was published under the title Encyclopedia Americana, under the editorial supervision of Scientific American magazine. The magazine's editor, Frederick Converse Beach, was editor-in-chief, and was said to be "assisted by more than one thousand of the most eminent scholars and authorities in America."^{[citation needed]} The first publisher was R.S. Peale & Co; between 1903 and 1906 further editions were issued by the Americana . and the Scientific American Compiling Department. The relationship with Scientific American was terminated in 1911. From 1907 to 1912, it was published as The Americana.

A major new edition of the Encyclopedia Americana appeared in 1918-20 in 30 volumes, and it has been regularly revised since. An Annual or Yearbook was also published annually from 1923 until 2000.

The encyclopedia was purchased by Grolier in 1945. For several years in the 1990s, the encyclopedia was offered on CD-ROM.

(J.M. Stoddart also published an Encyclopaedia Americana between 1883 and 1889, as a supplement to American reprintings of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, Stoddart's work is not connected to the earlier work by Lieber. Walsh, p. 42.)