The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is a 29-volume reference work that marked the beginning of the Encyclopædia Britannica The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. Articles are aimed at educated adults, and written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert contributors. It is regarded as the most scholarly of encyclopaedias's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day. This edition of the encyclopedia is now in the public domain Works are in the public domain if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all, if the intellectual property rights have expired, and/or if the intellectual property rights are forfeited. Examples include the English language, the formulae of Newtonian physics, as well as the works of Shakespeare and the patents over powered flight, but the outdated nature of some of its content makes its use as a source for modern scholarship problematic. Some articles have special value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts A cultural artifact is term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology[citation needed] for anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users. Usage of this term encompasses the type of archaeological artifact which is recovered at archaeological sites; however, of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Background

The 1911 1911 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Saturday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar) eleventh edition was assembled under the leadership of American publisher Horace Everett Hooper Born at Worcester, Mass, he left school at the age of 16, and after gaining experience in various book shops, founded the Western Book and Stationary Company at Denver Colorado. He sold books to the western states making use of the United States Postal Service, and edited by Hugh Chisholm Hugh Chisholm was a British journalist, and editor of the 11th and 12th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Originally, Hooper bought the rights to the 25-volume ninth edition and persuaded the British newspaper The Times The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of News International. News International is entirely owned by the News Corporation group, headed by Rupert Murdoch. Though traditionally a moderately centre-right newspaper and a supporter of the Conservatives, it supported the Labour Party in to issue its reprint, with eleven additional volumes (35 volumes total) as the tenth edition, which appeared in 1902. Hooper's association with The Times ceased in 1909, and he negotiated with the Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted Letters Patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest continually operating book publisher to publish the 29-volume eleventh edition. Though it is generally perceived as a quintessentially British work, the eleventh edition had substantial American influences, not only in the increased amount of American and Canadian content, but also in the efforts made to give it a more popular tone.^{[citation needed]} American marketing methods also assisted sales. Some 11% of the contributors were American, and a New York office was established to run that side of the enterprise.^{[citation needed]}

The initials of the encyclopedia's contributors appear at the end of each article (at the end of a section in the case of longer articles, such as that on China) and a key is given in each volume to these initials. Some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day, such as Edmund Gosse Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes, J. B. Bury John Bagnell Bury , known as J.B. Bury (rhymes with "jury"}, was an eminent Irish historian, classical scholar, Byzantinist and philologist, Algernon Charles Swinburne Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, controversial in his own day. He invented the roundel form, wrote some novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From 1903 to 1909 he was constantly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, John Muir John Muir was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, have been read by millions. His activism helped to save the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National, Peter Kropotkin Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin (Russian: Пётр Алексеевич Кропоткин) (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a geographer, a zoologist, and one of Russia's foremost anarchists. One of the first advocates of anarchist communism, Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government. Because of his title of, T. H. Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as Darwin's Bulldog for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and William Michael Rossetti Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. Among the then lesser-known contributors were some who would later become distinguished, such as Ernest Rutherford Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS was a British-New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named and Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, atheist, socialist, pacifist, and social critic. Although he spent most of his life in England, he was born in Wales where he also died, aged 97. Many articles were carried over from the ninth edition, some with minimal updating, some of the book-length articles divided into smaller parts for easier reference, yet others heavily abridged. The best-known authors generally contributed only a single article or part of an article. Most of the work was done by a mix of journalists, British Museum The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.[a] and other scholars. The 1911 edition for the first time included a number of female contributors, with 34 women contributing articles to the edition.^[1]

The eleventh edition introduced a number of changes to the format of the Britannica. It was the first to be published complete, instead of the previous method of volumes being released as they were ready. The type Letterpress printing is a term for the relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image. It was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes was kept in galleys In printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic. They are created for proofreading and copyediting purposes, but may be used for promotional and review purposes also and subject to continual updating until publication. It was the first edition of Britannica to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in which was added a categorical index, where like topics were listed. It was the first to break away from the convention of long treatise-length articles. Even though the overall length of the work was roughly the same as its predecessor, the number of articles had increased from 17,000 to 40,000. It was also the first edition of Britannica to contain biographies of living people.

According to Coleman and Simmons, p 32^[2] the content of the encyclopedia was made up as follows:

Hooper sold the rights to Sears Roebuck Sears, officially named Sears, Roebuck and Co., is an American chain of down-scale department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Roebuck in the late 19th century. Formerly a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Sears merged with Kmart in early 2005, creating the Sears Holdings Corporation of Chicago Chicago ( /ʃɨˈkɑːɡoʊ/ or /ʃɨˈkɔːɡoʊ/) is the largest city in both Illinois and the Midwest, and the third most populous city in the United States, with over 2.8 million living within the city limits. Its metropolitan area, commonly named "Chicagoland", is the 26th most populous in the world, home to an estimated 9.7 million in 1920, completing the Britannica's transition to becoming a substantially American venture.^{[citation needed]}

In 1922, an additional three volumes were published, covering the events of the intervening years, including the First World War World War I was a military conflict that lasted from 1914 to 1918 and involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies and the Central Powers. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 15 million people were. These, together with a reprint of the eleventh edition, formed the twelfth edition of the work. A similar thirteenth edition, of three volumes plus a reprint of the twelfth edition, was published in 1926, so the twelfth and thirteenth editions were of course closely related to the eleventh edition and shared much of the same content. However, it became increasingly clear that a more thorough update of the work was required.

The fourteenth edition, published in 1929, was considerably revised, with much text dropped or shortened to make room for new topics. Nevertheless, the eleventh edition was the basis of every later version of the Encyclopædia Britannica until the completely new fifteenth edition was published in 1974, using modern information presentation.

The eleventh edition's articles are still of value and interest to modern readers and scholars, especially as a cultural artifact A cultural artifact is term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology[citation needed] for anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users. Usage of this term encompasses the type of archaeological artifact which is recovered at archaeological sites; however,: the British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom, that had originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height it was the largest empire in history and, for over a was at its very height, imperialism Imperialism, as defined by The Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." Imperialism has been described as a primarily western concept that employs " was largely unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs A Monarch is the person who heads a monarchy, a form of government in which a country or entity is usually ruled or controlled by an individual who normally rules for life or until abdication. Monarchs may be autocrats or may be ceremonial heads of state who exercise little or no power or only reserve power, with actual authority vested in a, and the horrors of the modern world wars A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world's most powerful and populous nations. World wars span several continents, and last for multiple years. The term has usually been applied to two conflicts of unprecedented scale that occurred during the 20th century: World War I , World War II (1939–1945), although in retrospect a number of were still in the future. They are an invaluable resource for topics dropped from modern encyclopedias, particularly in biography and the history of science and technology. As a literary text, the encyclopedia holds value as a voice of early 20th-century prose. For example, it employs literary devices A literary technique, literary device, or literary motif is an identifiable rule of thumb, convention or structure that is employed in literature and storytelling, such as the pathetic fallacy The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations. The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification. The word 'pathetic' in this use is related to 'empathy' , and is not pejorative, which are not as common in modern texts.^[2]

Notable commentaries on the Eleventh Edition

In 1917, under his pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine, the US art critic and author Willard Huntington Wright S. S. Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright , a U.S art critic and author. He created the once immensely popular fictional detective Philo Vance, who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in movies and on the radio published Misinforming a Nation, a 200+ page criticism of inaccuracies and biases found in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. Wright claimed that Britannica was "characterized by misstatement, inexcusable omissions, rabid and patriotic prejudices, personal animosities, blatant errors of fact, scholastic ignorance, gross neglect of non-British culture, an astounding egotism, and an undisguised contempt for American progress."^[3]

Amos Urban Shirk Amos Urban Shirk was an American businessman, author and reader of encyclopedias, who read both the entire eleventh and fourteenth editions in the 1930s, said he found the fourteenth edition to be a "big improvement" over the eleventh, stating that "most of the material had been completely rewritten".

Robert Collison, in Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout The Ages (1966), wrote of the eleventh edition that it "was probably the finest edition of the Britannica ever issued, and it ranks with the Italiana The Enciclopedia Italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti , best known as Enciclopedia Treccani or simply Treccani, is an Italian encyclopedia, generally regarded as the most authoritative in that language. Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout The Ages regards it as one of the greatest encyclopedias, along with the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Espasa The Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana is a Spanish encyclopedia comprising 72 volumes (numbered from 1 to 70, with parts 18 and 28 consisting of two volumes each) published from 1908 to 1930 plus a ten-volume appendix published 1930-1933. Between 1935 and 2003, 33 supplemental volumes were published plus an index, another A-Z as one of the three greatest encyclopaedias in the world. It was the last edition to be produced almost in its entirety in Britain, and its position in time as a summary of the world's knowledge just before the outbreak of World War I is particularly valuable."

Sir Kenneth Clark Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation. In 1969, he achieved an international presence as the writer, producer, and presenter of the BBC Television series, Civilisation, in Another Part of the Wood (1974), wrote of the eleventh edition, "One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies Idiosyncrasy, from Ancient Greek ἰδιοσυγκρασία, idiosynkrasía, "a peculiar temperament", "habit of body" is defined as an individualizing quality or characteristic of a person or group, and is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. The term can also be applied to symbols. Idiosyncratic symbols mean of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopaedia in the tradition of Diderot Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best-known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice. When T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement, and was wrote 'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopædia Britannica,' he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition." (Clark refers to Eliot's 1929 poem "Animula".)

1911 Britannica in the 21st century

The 1911 edition is no longer restricted by copyright Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. These rights can be licensed, transferred and/or assigned. Copyright lasts for a certain time period after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to a wide range of, and it is available in several more modern forms. While it may have been a reliable description of the general consensus of its time, for some modern readers, the Encyclopedia has several glaring errors, ethnocentric remarks, and other issues:

• Contemporary beliefs about race The term race or racial group usually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics. The physical features commonly seen as indicating race are salient visual traits such as skin color, cranial or facial features and hair texture. Conceptions of race, as well and ethnicity An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or assumed- sharing cultural characteristics This shared heritage may be based upon putative common ancestry, history, kinship, religion, language, shared territory, nationality or physical appearance. Members of an ethnic group are are included in the Encyclopedia's articles. For example, the entry for "Negro The word Negro was used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not, prior to the shift in the lexicon of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s. The word "negro" means "black" in Spanish and Portuguese, from the" states, "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts."^[4] The article about the American War of Independence attributes the success of the United States in part to "a population mainly of good English blood and instincts".^[5]
• Many articles are now factually outdated, in particular those on science, technology, international and municipal law, and medicine. For example, the article on the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi speculates that it is caused by a fungus, vitamins not having been discovered at the time. Articles about geographic places mention rail connections and ferry stops in towns that today no longer employ such transport.
• Even where the facts might still be accurate, new information, theories and perspectives developed since 1911 have substantially changed the way the same facts might be interpreted. For example, the modern interpretation of the history of the Visigoths is very different from that reflected in the eleventh edition which used the now out-of-favor Great man theory,^{[citation needed]} such that there are no entries for Visigoth or Goth; rather the history of the tribe is found under the entry for Alaric I.

The eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica has become a commonly quoted source, both because of the reputation of the Britannica and because it is now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet. It has been used as a source by many modern projects including Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Encyclopedia.

Gutenberg Encyclopedia

The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. Project Gutenberg's offerings are summarized below in the External links section and include text and graphics. Distributed Proofreaders are currently working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

References

1. ^ Gillian Thomas (1992). A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0810825678.
2. ^ ^{a b} *All There is to Know (1994), edited by Alexander Coleman and Charles Simmons. Subtitled: "Readings from the Illustrious Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica". ISBN 067176747X
3. ^ Misinforming a Nation. 1917. Chapter 1.
4. ^ Willcox, Walter Francis (1911). "Negro". Encyclopædia Britannica. Volume XIX (11th ed.). New York: Encyclopædia Britannica. pp. 344. http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Tim_Starling/ScanSet_TIFF_demo&vol=19&page=EC9A362. Retrieved 2007-01-10.
5. ^ Hannay, David (1911). "American War of Independence". Encyclopædia Britannica. Volume I (11th ed.). New York: Encyclopædia Britannica. pp. 845. http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Tim_Starling/ScanSet_TIFF_demo&vol=01&page=EB1A895. Retrieved 2007-01-10.

External links

Free, public-domain sources for 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica text

• Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed. 1911, separate volumes in several formats, on the Internet Archive:

• Full-page scans in TIFF format.

• Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia:

Other sources for 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica text

• The "LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia" is a wiki that is "based" on the original encyclopædia text, and claims copyright on the modified text.
• The JRank "Online Encyclopedia" includes original and contributed articles; the originals may have been edited and the collection is subject to a claimed copyright.

Categories: Encyclopædia Britannica | 1911 books | Reference works in the public domain | 1911 in the United Kingdom

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