The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America - Tapa dura

Críticas

Nothing was more crucial to America's founding than the Enlightenment, and no one played a more important role than Benjamin Franklin in transmitting the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment to the wider public in the form of useful knowledge. Jonathan Lyons, an engaging storyteller and insightful scholar, conveys the breathtaking sweep of this crucial story with grace and flair, and in the process he provides a compelling and innovative perspective on the American Revolution and the new nation that emerged from that upheaval. (John Ferling, author of THE ASCENT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON and INDEPENCE: THE STRUGGLE TO SET AMERICA FREE)

Lyons has two principal and intertwined stories to tell: the career of Franklin and the rise of the useful and the practical in American education and society...clear, focused snapshots of a movement and its celebrated leader. (Kirkus Reviews)

[A] 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. (Booklist)

Lyons has raised important questions about the origins of "useful knowledge" in America that will have wide appeal. Recommended. (Library Journal)

You can listen to an interview with Jonathan Lyons on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show here:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/jun/25/bringing-enlightenment-america/

Reseña del editor

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 well and truly past, Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that 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 knowledge 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, original portraits of figures like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the inimitable, endlessly inventive Franklin, Lyons gives us 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 our digital present.