First American Info Wars

Though united on the importance of a participatory citizenry, America’s founders and early elites differed on how to prepare and educate a responsible electorate. Their vigorous debates over what intellectual authority should stand in a republic inform George Oberle’s book, Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic. In this presentation, Oberle will show how political debates evolved regarding which institutions could best serve a republican polity. Leaders in the first sixty years of the republic argued over whether a national university, or a military academy, specialized learned societies, or a national museum would best serve the needs of this diffused and expansive society. In the end, Oberle shows how the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution served as a political compromise that offered the opportunity for a new society built upon scientific expertise in the newly forming knowledge market. His intellectual mapping of the founding period shows how an information revolution had effects as profound as those of the political and market revolutions underway from 1780 to 1860, with implications that reverberate today.

Dr. George Oberle is History Librarian at George Mason University, where he has held librarian faculty roles since 2004. He also teaches as an Associate (Term) Professor in the university’s Department of History and Art History. Oberle cofounded and serves as director of the Center for Mason Legacies, an interdisciplinary research center chartered by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with University Libraries. He is the author of Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Community event in Richmond, Richmond city County, VA 23220.