Introduction

            In 1936, well into the course of a literary career as a magazine and middlebrow professional, Henry Seidel Canby, editor of The Saturday Review of Literature and chief judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club, published a thoughtful memoir about academic life.   Entitled Alma Mater:   The Gothic Age of the American College , his book attempted to take stock of how changing definitions of learning had altered American society. ² Based upon his experiences at Yale both as student and then as a young professor, Canby suggested that “there has never been anything quite like the American college of the turn of the twentieth century, never any institution more confused in its purposes, more vital, more mixed in its ideas….” ³ He claimed furthermore that “just as the typical American of the nineties was a small-town man, so the dominant American type of our thirties is college bred.” ⁴ Canby proposed, therefore, to assess the impact of the modern college, to figure out “what it was, what it did to us, what powerful hands it laid upon the United States of our generation.” ⁵

            In laying out his purpose, Henry Canby cautioned that he was writing about the American college, not “that larger organization of professional schools, service bureaus, and organs of scholarship, called a university.” ⁶   Nevertheless, his account is thoroughly haunted by the figure of the modern research university and the changing definition of learning it promoted.   As Canby acknowledged, the American college was a dramatically different institution in 1910 from what it had been as late as 1870 because the years between witnessed “the triumph of applied science, the breakdown of stereotyped religion, the defeat of the classics in American education, and the dramatic appearance, full blown, of American confidence in our own scholarship and our own literature.” ⁷   Although these developments altered the American college irrevocably, their emergence was bound up most intimately with the appearance of the American research university in the years between 1870 and 1915.   And though the history of the American university is traditionally connected to the rise of the corporation in American business, to increasing specialization and bureaucratization, and to the emergence of modern professionalism, it must also be connected to the vastly changed print culture that developed during these years as well.  

            In fact, one might argue that the learned culture that emerged slowly in the universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century was as much a matter of changed reading and writing practices and altered networks for the transmission and circulation of information as it was of shifting epistemologies, changed subject matter, and altered goals.   Although traditional bound books continued to play an important role in learned culture between 1880 and 1915, especially within the disciplines that would be described as “the humanities,” increasingly, the highly specialized culture of advanced learning that emerged in these years was advanced by regularized, repetitive, and predictable forms of journal publication as well as by new forms of professional association.   As a consequence, learning lost some of its associations with the preservation and appreciation of settled tradition, especially at the new research universities.   It was reconceived after a model that emerged in the sciences.   Where once science had been conceptualized as a process of inductive reasoning from established principles, increasingly it was associated with empirical investigation and conceptualized as a dynamic, evolutionary, and progressive practice, one that was ever-changing and ever-advancing in its claim to mastery.   Distinct precincts of the world were scrutinized by a small group of specialists reading and writing principally for each other.

            This reconception of learning was so widespread and consequential that it affected even the standard methods for the teaching of the received literary and cultural tradition.   As Henry Canby observed, “Now the scientific approach became fashionable.   Scholars in literature who called themselves scientific began to dominate the graduate schools and extend their influence into the sacred precincts of the undergraduate college.   Applying the technique of scientific research to language, they revealed an evolution with laws of its own the discovery of which was a noble extension of knowledge.” ⁸ As a consequence, philology and literary history moved to the center of the emerging discipline of the modern languages, which began to supplant the traditional classics curriculum. At first, professional literary scholars preoccupied themselves with tracing the fine points of linguistic evolution and with the particulars of literary source study.   Later, adopting the predilection for the new and the paradigmatic habit of seeking conceptual breakthroughs familiar to the sciences, the discipline involved itself in generating continually new literary interpretations and promoting recent theoretical breakthroughs. ⁹  

             This shift did not go unchallenged, however, as Canby's own memoir makes clear.   Self-described “generalists” like Canby who clustered in undergraduate teaching colleges championed an alternative model of learning known as ‘the liberal arts ideal.”   A modification of the older classical curriculum, this course of study opposed both the rising dominance of the sciences and the specialization associated with literary history and philology.   Liberal arts advocates sought to cultivate character and intellect rather than the practicality and utility they associated with the sciences.   They also tended to oppose the sciences' fetishism of “the new.”   At the same time, they set themselves in opposition to the development of a technical and highly specialized body of knowledge about an isolated aesthetic realm sheared off from the rest of the world.   Insisting on the moral and even political relevance of the liberal arts to contemporary society, many humanities advocates like Canby left the university in despair at the insularity of highly technical literary study in order to take up the work of championing the powers of culture and literature for educated general readers.  

            Although middlebrow cultural organs like the Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club initially preoccupied themselves with marketing literature and poetry to a broad general audience, increasingly, the health of these enterprises depended on their ability to capitalize on widespread general interest in the forms of professional expertise and knowledge production that emerged in the 1880s and then flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century.   Increasingly, they wrote, advocated, and marketed handbooks, encyclopedias, and guidebooks to this new knowledge even as they publicized popularized versions of technical information that had been developed first within highly specialized journals written for professional knowledge producers. Despite the reliance of an organization like the Book-of-the-Month Club on an older Arnoldian language of the universal, the unchanging and the best, it was in fact organized to maximize sales by promoting periodicity and the cachet of the new; hence it offered “the best book of the month.” ¹⁰   Because interest in the timely was a constitutive principle not only of the Club but also of other middlebrow cultural organs like The Literary Guild, The Reader's Digest , and the radio show, “Information Please!,” they found it quite natural to adopt the role of cultural popularizers. ¹¹   What they sold to their educated general readers in the form of summaries and handbooks was the assurance that they could keep up with the bewildering pace of evolving knowledge about the modern world.

            In the context of this conference and volume on the arts of transmission, I think it is worth underscoring the fact that Canby's Alma Mater exposes the complex connections between the development of the research university in the United States, the emergence of new practices of professionalized knowledge production and transmission, changes in the disciplines, and the growth of a popularly oriented periodical culture from which emerged a distinct new cultural configuration known as the middlebrow. While Alma Mater is most centrally the work of a middlebrow literary authority, a generalist who believed in the value of literature and the humanities as a form of critical knowledge about the world, it also the work of a man who was able to make a successful living precisely because a significant body of educated readers developed in the years after the turn of the century who eagerly sought familiarity with exploding forms of new knowledge about the world.   Canby and others like him made their middlebrow living by consolidating a powerful new circuit of production and circulation that, though distinct from professionalized and specialized academic circuits of transmission, was significantly related to them.   As we shall soon see, this dependence worked to the advantage of some of the disciplines and the professionals who worked within them because middlebrow organs circulated news of their work and helped to legitimate them by increasing their professional prestige. In effect, middlebrow culture augmented and extended what had been begun by key portions of the newspaper and magazine industries; they helped to create and strengthen markets for professional expertise.   In effect, they proved a critical component in the emergence of what Burton Bledstein and others have called a “culture of professionalism.” ¹²

            This sort of productive symbiosis could not so easily be established, however, between middlebrow culture and professionalized, academic, literary culture, in part because middlebrow authorities like Canby actively competed with others laboring within the changing literary field.   For the most part, middlebrow arbiters disapproved of the philologists and literary historians as well as those seeking to create a new literary avant-garde, because they could see no use, commercial or otherwise, for the literary products such efforts generated. Use was important to middlebrow authorities because, as literary entrepreneurs, their work depended on the viability of marketing appeals that could explain to potential consumers how they might benefit from the purchase of books, magazines, or other cultural materials.    What ensued, once middlebrow authorities began to elaborate their own arguments for the use-value of culture, was a struggle over the authority to pronounce on the role of literature in the world. ¹³¹⁴

            In the countervailing efforts of academics and the literary avant-garde to distance themselves from middlebrow arbiters like Canby, such entrepreneurs were characterized as little more than literary businessmen.   Significantly, in differentiating themselves from the middlebrow willingness to court “every Babbitt who could afford the price of admission,” academics and modernist writers eschewed the circuits of transmission associated with middlebrow culture and opted instead for the small, specialized circuits of the scholarly journal and the little magazine.   Though this may have served to construct a kind of social, technological, and ideological “outside” to the dominant culture from which both groups could advance their own versions of cultural critique, it also left them vulnerable because it hindered them from establishing a significant relationship with an educated general audience that might have been persuaded of its need to rely on their cultural authority rather than on that of middlebrow arbiters like Canby.   Lacking an audience and market for the specialized knowledge they continued to produce, literary professionals of both the academic and avant-garde varieties were vulnerable to being shunted aside both within the university context and the larger culture not only by the discourse and public intellectuals associated with the sciences and the social sciences, but also, eventually, by newer cultural producers working with transmission technologies even broader in scope than print -- technologies like radio, film, television, and digital communication. What I would like to do in the space remaining to me is to provide a schematic map of this larger ecology of knowledge production and transmission in the United States in order to show how the structural role played by magazine and middlebrow culture in the culture of professionalism that emerged between 1880 and 1945 can help to illuminate part of what troubles English and the humanities today. ¹⁴

  Universities and the Growth of Research

            Much has been written about the development of the research university in the United States.   The literature is vast in part because so many different factors can be highlighted as the critical determining agent. ¹⁵   The influence of the German model of higher education figures centrally in most narratives while others focus on the outmoded nature of the traditional college curriculum, on the growing success of science and its ability to meet the needs of American business and manufacturing, on the rise of technically oriented and utilitarian forms of knowledge, on the impact of specialization, and on the development of modern professionalism itself.   In fact, all of these developments contributed to the emergence of the American research university and helped to change the culture of learning in the United States.   Together, they slowly transformed localized, avocational circles of learning into a highly differentiated business of professional knowledge production in the years between 1880 and 1915.

              Prior to the Civil War, the vast majority of colleges in the U. S. were small, denominationally organized institutions seeking to cultivate mental discipline in a population of elite young men preparing for professional training in divinity, law, or medicine. ¹⁶   After the war, efforts to reform the colleges multiplied as critics of the traditional curriculum attempted to adapt it to a rapidly changing world.   Spurred on by the sense that new forms of training would be necessary in a world transformed by the market revolution, factories, railroads, and augmented communication networks, the colleges also altered their curricula because they realized that new forms of knowledge were rapidly being generated within the natural sciences.   Some, like Harvard and Yale, actually created scientific colleges.   Others expanded their faculties and adopted the elective system pioneered at Harvard.   Eventually, the colleges were joined by innovative institutions with new purposes, different organization and funding structures, and an altered relationship to learning.   Where the college focused almost exclusively on the cultivation of mental discipline and character in undergraduates by familiarizing them with the known -- whether in literature, moral philosophy or natural science –universities, land grant agricultural schools, and technical research institutes focused at least in part on the generation and communication of new knowledge.   Faculty time, as a consequence, was increasingly devoted to the business of research and the reading and writing that supported it.

            This is not to say that research faculties did not teach.   Rather, they began to apportion their time differently.   Hired by institutions recently created to foster basic research or to provide technical and utilitarian support for local populations, new faculties gradually focused their activities in laboratories and libraries and sought to generate new knowledge in their particular areas of expertise.   Although they also sought to communicate evolving knowledge to their students, increasingly, they defined their primary academic relationships as those with their specialist peers.   Because they sought regular association with researchers engaged in similar projects, they formulated over time a new social and communication infrastructure that became essential to university life.   Disciplines, departments, professional associations and societies, as well as specialized journals and university presses all were installed as critical components of learned culture during these years. ¹⁷

            It is common to associate the development of this changed culture of learning with the development of research universities in particular.   Thus, the 76 founding of The Johns Hopkins University looms large in narratives that also credit the creative leadership of Daniel Coit Gilman in adapting the German model of university training in the advanced sciences to the American context. ¹⁸   Indeed, the example Hopkins would set in the last quarter of the nineteenth century would be an inspiration to many who sought to re-orient American higher education around the graduate training of research specialists especially in the rapidly advancing sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and mathematics.   It was at Hopkins, for instance, where a close and consequential relationship between scientific research, graduate training, and new forms of association and publication would most significantly be forged. Still, other institutions that developed both before and after Hopkins also had a long-term impact on the reorganization and reorientation of higher education in the U.S.   Chief among these were the land grant colleges and universities that developed predominantly in the Midwest in the years following the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act. ¹⁹ Additionally, however, technical schools and research programs and institutes sponsored by the federal government -- such as those at the U. S. Department of Agriculture, the Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Ethnology -- as well as by philanthropic foundations and industrial enterprises all began to exert pressure on older conceptions of learning. ²⁰

            Land grant colleges and universities, for example, were noted early on for promulgating the assumption that learning should have utilitarian purpose.   Spurred on by the Morrill Act's requirement that institutional recipients of federal funds offer agricultural and mechanical education to the people of their states, these institutions focused on agricultural research, sought to provide advice on legislative programs, and pioneered in the creation of extension courses to foster on-going education. ²¹ Although there was a substantial measure of disagreement in land grant institutions over what counted as a more “utilitarian” and “democratic” education, most of them aimed to broaden the typical college's offerings and to root them more resolutely in the so-called “realities” of everyday life. ²² They also began to admit women. Although many of these institutions continued to train undergraduates in the liberal arts, they also innovated by linking vocational training in agriculture and engineering with research in the basic sciences.   Cornell University, led by Andrew D. White, the University of Michigan, headed by James B. Angell, and the University of Wisconsin headed by Charles Kendall Adams and Charles Van Hise pioneered in seeking to train a democratically selected population for a range of practical and politically oriented vocations.

            These changing approaches to education reconfigured older understandings of learning as mastery and profession of a stable body of generally accepted truths, canons, and traditions.   Instead, learning was reconceived as the command of a highly specialized body of constantly evolving knowledge about a particular fraction of the world through the mastery of a specialized set of techniques for apprehending it. ²³   At both research universities and land grant institutions where the latter definition of learning was encouraged, the pedagogical function of faculties, while never eliminated entirely, gradually began to take second place to the growing importance of the research function.   This shift even took place within the humanities, where most of the resistance to the evolutionary model of knowledge production was concentrated.   Still, some humanities scholars like the Latinist William Gardner Hale enthusiastically acquiesced in the new dispensation. ²⁴   As Hale once commented, “It is the minds that have advanced beyond what they have received from others that have brought us to the point where we are.   It is the discoverers , in far greater measure than to the transmitters, that the world is under obligation.” ²⁵

            Hale accurately diagnosed a shift in the relative weights accorded research and pedagogy within the university around the turn of the century.   However, by opposing research to transmission and by simply valuing the former over the latter, he missed the significance of a critical structural relationship between research and more mediated processes of transmission that intensified within the culture of learning at this time.   Although many research professors placed less emphasis on face-to-face teaching than had their predecessors or did those employed in undergraduate colleges where the liberal arts held sway, they did not give up their involvement in the business of transmitting information entirely.   In fact, as the business of conducting original research began to gain more and more prominence and to grow both more specialized and more complex within the fraternity of the learned, it became ever more important to communicate with peers about common pursuits.   At the same time, as research communities and academic disciplines specialized and professionalized, it also became critical to disseminate information about research findings to the lay population from whom financial support and a client base in the form of students had to be drawn.   Increasingly, both practices were conducted through the mediations of a rapidly differentiating print culture.   Researchers communicated with each other through specialized journals.   They communicated with the broader public through popularized accounts of their research in magazine articles, in trade books designed for the educated, general reader, and through an ever-multiplying number of handbooks, guidebooks, and encyclopedias that codified this new knowledge ²⁶ Before one can understand fully why this intensified symbiosis between the generation, communication, and transmission of knowledge developed at this time, it is necessary to understand something more about the altered social context within which the new colleges and universities turned their attention to research.

Incorporation, Information, and “Brain Workers”

            In the years after the Civil War, a potent combination of factors significantly altered the nature of work and employment for a large segment of the American population.   This in turn contributed to the need for differently trained workers and thus to a notably enlarged population of students who sought new forms of education for new kinds of work.   Ultimately, these interlocking developments increased American society's dependence on the rapid development, transmission, and circulation of information and thus to the need for a transformed infrastructure capable of accomplishing all three tasks.

            In addressing the question of why research institutions, land grant universities, and technical institutes all emerged within a thirty or forty-year period, it is as important to consider external financial and social conditions as it is to address internal organizational and intellectual developments. Both sets of forces contributed to the transformation of educational practice in these years and both thereby helped to alter the way knowledge was generated, discussed and transmitted to immediate and more distant populations alike.   To begin with, these institutions were made possible by the availability of a large concentration of surplus capital that could be invested in higher education. ²⁷   Although a significant portion of this capital came from the hands of a new social elite involved in manufacturing and business rather than in mercantile or real estate transactions, some of it also came from state legislatures and alumni as well.   Additionally, as Alexandra Oleson and John Voss have pointed out, “ it was the students who came to colleges and universities in expanding numbers who formed the principal economic base of American science and scholarship.” ²⁸   Indeed the number of American undergraduates rose from about 52,300 in 1870 to 155,800 in 1890, 237,600 in 1900 and 597,900 in 1920. ²⁹

            Larger numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities in part because they could.   Which is to say, their families could financially afford to spare them from the responsibility of contributing to family upkeep.   But they also enrolled in increasing numbers because it appeared to them and to their families that a university or college education was an investment in the future.   Where once higher education led only to the ministry, law, or medicine for the children of the social elite, by the 1880s, it was clear that it could prepare a more diverse population for careers in business or in any number of the new technical and specialized professions that emerged at this time in response to demands made by industry, business, and the increasingly bureaucratic state and federal governments.

            This was the case in large part because the transformation of American culture by the complex phenomenon Alan Trachtenberg has called “incorporation” created an increased demand for individuals who could produce, organize, and circulate information, act as managers of processes and people, and generally foster integration among and within American businesses and institutions. ³⁰   Significantly, the period during which the research university emerged was also the period in which the modern corporation became the dominant organizational form within business and industry.   Described by Alfred Chandler as a “multiunit business enterprise,” the modern corporation entailed the internalization and administrative coordination of business units that could theoretically have operated independently. ³¹   However, by integrating them into a single over-arching enterprise, significant economies of speed and scale could be achieved.

              Chandler's enumeration of how those economies were achieved is worth quoting here because it gives a good sense of why these developments required different kinds of workers with new kinds of education and new abilities to work efficiently with information.

            By routinizing the transactions between units, the costs of these transactions were lowered.   By linking the administration of producing units with buying and distributing units, costs for information on markets and sources of supply were reduced.   Of much greater significance, the internalization of many units permitted the flow of goods from one unit to another to be administratively coordinated.   More effective scheduling of flows achieved a more intensive use of facilities and personnel employed in the processes of production and distribution and so increased productivity and reduced costs.   In addition, administrative coordination provided a more certain cash flow and more rapid payment for services rendered.” ³²

            In other words, when corporations acted to integrate organizations, processes, and people, they increased their need for capable managers and simultaneously found it necessary to generate and circulate vast quantities of information to facilitate control and coordination.   Where once a business owner performed all sorts of functions himself in a small, often family-run business, in the new, more extended corporation, he found it necessary to employ managers, technicians, and specially trained individuals to coordinate diverse activities. ³³ Described at the time as “brain workers,” these individuals depended upon complex computational and literacy skills as well as on social skills requisite to working with large numbers of people.   Indeed as James Beniger has pointed out, the managerial revolution in American business documented by Chandler was itself accompanied by an equally consequential social and cultural revolution in the way business practices were integrated and coordinated. ³⁴   “Before this time,” Beniger notes, “control of government and markets had depended on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the mass media.” ³⁵ The control revolution, as Beniger terms it, united efforts to amass and manage different forms of information with an equally important push to circulate that information both quickly and extensively.

            During the post-Civil War period, machines as well as corporations had become far more complex.   As a consequence, they both depended on the circulation of large quantities of data to keep them running.   Faster, more sophisticated machines depended on the careful calibration and preprocessing of materials to be fed into the system as well as upon the use of complex feedback devices to track the results.   Similarly, corporations required trained workers, specialized accounting practices, professional managers, “scientific management” techniques, and statistical quality control to oversee the integration of far-flung units and sub-units.   The vastly augmented industrial output that resulted from these innovations then demanded parallel control of distribution processes. The new, vertically integrated corporations learned to utilize the national railroad and telegraph systems and an expanding U. S. postal system to manage distribution more efficiently. More effective distribution, of course, then demanded equally effective efforts to control consumption.   As a consequence, a whole new retail system developed that depended as much on complex devices for tracking inventory as on the publishing of information about available goods. The latter, like virtually all of the control schemes mentioned above, depended at least in part on the auxiliary circulation of words and numbers at ever-faster rates.   All of it, then, was dependent upon the perfection of the power-drive, multiple rotary printing press, a highly complex machine that was itself essential to that which emerged as a consequence, a differentiated yet nationally-oriented print culture. ³⁶

            In the years between 1870 and 1920, in fact, a highly variegated print culture generated the “riot” of words described by Burton Bledstein. ³⁷ Daily newspaper circulation multiplied by seven times between 1870 and 1900.   During the same period, the number of post offices tripled while the sale of ordinary postage stamps increased by a factor of seven. ³⁸ Between 1880 and 1910, the number of new titles published in the United States increased sixfold from about 2,000 books a year to 13,000. ³⁹ This was made possible by a significant increase in the number of publishing firms as well as by the growth of literacy of the general population. Indeed it was this more broadly literate population that devoured the periodical literature that increased fivefold between 1865 and 1885.   And, as Richard Ohmann has documented in Selling Culture , that literature was essential to the elaboration of the new retail infrastructure and the advertising industry that facilitated its efficient functioning.

            Even this highly compressed version of a complex history should demonstrate almost immediately that nearly everyone who would labor in the control sectors of the economy would require sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.   At the same time, they also needed more focused educations to enable their work in the increasingly specialized spaces, sites, and regions of an ever-more differentiated yet integrated society.   It thus should be clear why the elective system first imagined at Harvard looked so sensible to the officers of innovative colleges and universities around the country.   The freedom of choice and specialization that it promoted among students would enable those institutions to prepare their students for a range of different careers.   At the same time, new university and college presidents additionally advocated increased vocational and technical courses of study for those students in order to prepare them for emerging lines of work as specialized “experts” of one sort or another.   Little wonder that a college education soon looked like a guarantor of future employment for the children of the expanding middle classes.   Indeed, as Laurence Veysey has pointed out, “Such untraditional disciplines as pedagogy, domestic science, business administration, sanitary science, physical education, and various kinds of engineering were all becoming firmly established at a number of leading universities by the turn of the century.” ⁴⁰ Roger Geiger has noted as well that the applied sciences and engineering expanded most rapidly during the 80s and 90s and tended to attract the newer kind of college student interested primarily in professional preparation. ⁴¹

            The drift toward the dominance of the sciences, both natural and social, was so marked, in fact, that those professing the older arts of literature, language, history, and philosophy increasingly defended their work under the rubric of “the humanities” and began to coordinate their efforts in order to seek financial support from college presidents and university administrations. ⁴² However, the very fact that the humanists had to operate in this way in order to secure university resources only further testifies to the fact that by the 1890s the research university and the new scientific orientation it encouraged had mounted a strong bid to dominate American higher education.

Professional Knowledge Production and the Creation of the Expert

            The sciences and the social sciences emerged as powerful forces at this time not simply because they held out the promise of creating new technologies and methods for addressing the problems and potentials of a rapidly incorporating society.   They also became powerful because they pioneered in the adoption of organizational forms that institutionalized the intellectual specialization that had become the hallmark of the scientific enterprise.   In fact, as the sciences marked themselves off from each other theoretically and methodologically, those with specialized competencies increasingly moved to organize their efforts more effectively through the creation of autonomous departments, professional societies, specialized journals, and particular forms of credentialing.   In effect, through the process of disciplining their own work and that of the specialists they sought to train, they began to organize knowledge production in new ways.   The university, in turn, itself began to take on the character of a complex corporation with semi-autonomous departments whose co-ordination had to be managed at any number of different levels, whether administratively, financially, or with respect to the curriculum.  

            Historians disagree about what constituted professionalization in the sciences and in academia more generally.   Nor do they agree about the precise causes of the phenomenon.   Still, it is clear that the history of professionalization in the sciences had everything to do with specialization, with the growing emphasis on laboratory research, and with the creation of a communications infrastructure that enabled the publication, circulation, and discussion of research results not only among specialist peers but among a larger society called upon to finance such research, to support it with students, and to understand its value. ⁴³   As the various disciplines professionalized, they sought and obtained the kind of autonomy that would enable them to control the credentialing of new members.   At the same time, that autonomy could never be so complete as to isolate the discipline and its avatars from the larger population that was required to recognize its special legitimacy and to turn to it for professional advice, assistance, and treatment.   As a consequence, it became necessary to find ways to foster relationships with non-specialists as well.

            It is common to associate the emergence of the new organizational forms with the founding of Hopkins.   In his detailed history of the institution, Hugh Hawkins has pointed out that the scholars assembled in Baltimore by Daniel Coit Gilman moved quickly to consolidate disciplinary autonomy and to assume vanguard positions in their respective disciplines.   One of the ways they sought to do both was through the establishment of scholarly journals. Hawkins claims with good cause in fact that “Hopkins was the cradle of the scholarly journal in America.” ⁴⁴ Indeed five of the six original departments at Hopkins organized specialized journals within a few years of the university's founding.   They did so, in part, because there were few regularly appearing journals available to them in the United States for the publication of their research results.   As Daniel Kevles has pointed out, although “A count of research papers appearing in the 1870s indicates that about thirty chemists, twenty physicists, and probably still fewer mathematicians pursued and published research with any regularity” in the U. S”, that small number still had to resort to journals published abroad to make their work known. ⁴⁵   This seemed an inadequate solution to ambitious men who were attempting not only to establish their own individual reputations but also were making claims about the excellence and legitimacy of the new American institutions that employed them. Indeed, the faculty at Hopkins quickly recognized that if they were to make claims not only about the excellence of their own research but also about the stature of their institution and the American research community more generally, they would need reliable means to convey their activities and findings to their scholarly peers.

            In fact, only a few months after the university was officially founded, Gilman encouraged and extended financial support to a group of mathematicians led by J. J. Sylvester in their efforts to form The American Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics .   The first issue of the journal was published “under university auspices” in 1878.   Although this did not mean that a full-fledged university press had been established in Baltimore – in fact, the title, Johns Hopkins University Press, wouldn't be used officially until 1891 – it did mean that Gilman and the Hopkins trustees at least recognized that it was in the interest of the institution to subsidize the cost of disseminating research results. ⁴⁶ Even as Sylvester was organizing this mathematical journal, Ira Remsen of the chemistry department sought to create a parallel journal in his own field that would enable him and his laboratory colleagues to publish their earliest research findings. ⁴⁷   His stated rationale for the journal demonstrates clearly that the developing research culture at Hopkins valorized the creation of new knowledge.   Concomitantly, it sought to use the apparatus of print to establish American claims to scientific expertise and authorship as well as to transmit the knowledge thereby produced to an international community of peers. Remsen explained to Gilman that a university-supported journal should be organized for two reasons:  

1st.   That we may be recognized as soon as possible as belonging to the working Chemists of the country; 2 nd . That the results of our labors may be insured to us or, in other words, to establish our priority. In Germany, France and England there are journals intended for such preliminary publications, and articles sent to them are sure to appear promptly.

Remsen hoped that the creation of a regularly publishing journal would establish his laboratory's claim to innovation and origination and assist in the consolidation of a specifically national scientific community that might compete with then dominant European scientists.   Gilman supported Remsen as he had Sylvester and soon thereafter “an army of scholarly journals and monograph series” began to issue from Baltimore. ⁴⁸ Gilman reported with satisfaction to the Trustees:

Publication has been encouraged – so far as possible through channels already established – but when necessary through agencies of our own.   We have not instituted a university press, but we have made arrangement for the systematic printing of mathematical, chemical, biological, and philosophical papers.   We have hoped in this way to extend the usefulness of this foundation far beyond the company of those whom we constantly instruct. ⁴⁹

Mediated dissemination, in Gilman's view, because it was more extensive, was equally as important as the dissemination of knowledge that occurred in the classroom.

            Since there is as yet no comprehensive history of the scholarly journal in the United States, it is difficult to generalize about their development, organization or funding.   Many of the journals sponsored by national scholarly associations were funded by subscription fees and subsidized by an association's membership dues.   But the impulse to create venues for the research findings of the growing cadre of university based researchers led also to the enthusiastic founding of department-based journals at a number of leading universities throughout the 80s and 90s whose sole purpose was to publicize the results of local faculty research.   In the years between 1880 and 1906, Hopkins sponsored six such journals, Chicago funded twelve, the University of California created five, Columbia six, Cornell five, and Harvard sponsored eight. ⁵⁰   Most of these department-based journals disappeared relatively quickly because few departments generated enough research on their own to keep them going. By the second decade of the new century, then, scholarly publication tended to be split between journals sponsored by national associations and sub-disciplinary organs arising from by inter-university communities of specialists. ⁵¹ In the field of chemistry, for instance, the original, more catholic journals were joined later by the Journal of Physical Chemistry , the Journal of Biological Chemistry , and the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. ⁵²

            It seems clear that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the activities of an increasingly prominent segment of the fraternity of the learned were intricately bound up with an elaborate print and publication infrastructure that emphasized the regular, periodic publication of new research results.   In some ways, developments in the learned world paralleled those in the culture at large, which witnessed the explosion of popular magazines and newspapers during this same period.   In emphasizing speed and timeliness of reporting, these developments helped to transform the very idea of learning and culture from the mastery of a limited collection of universal truths to an understanding of it as an evolving, ever-improving body of information and knowledge about the real world. ⁵³   In addition, this move toward periodical publication constituted a significant challenge to the pre-eminence of the bound book as the principle technology for the production, dissemination, and circulation of information in American society.   Hugh Hawkins notes for instance that though it possessed a remarkable collection of periodicals in its early years (one thousand serials by 1889), the library at Hopkins had only one tenth of the books claimed by Harvard. ⁵⁴ Inasmuch as the period from 1880 to 1925 or so might be deemed the high water mark of book culture in the United States, so too must it be seen as the period in which significant challenges to the book developed.   Though these challenges would multiply with the appearance of new broadcast technologies like radio, film, and television, I think it fair to suggest that the process gathered steam behind the expansion of a highly differentiated periodical culture that ran the gamut from The American Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics to Philatelic Monthly to Munsey's and Cosmopolitan.

            This is not to say, of course, that book publication was outmoded entirely in the academic world anymore than it was in the culture at large.   Bound books still carried a significant amount of prestige and many researchers sought to present their work in the extended format made possible by the traditional codex format. In fact, the very years that saw the rise of the scholarly association and periodicals also saw the development of the first university presses in the United States. Although Andrew White and Cornell University are usually credited with the creation of the first such press in America, Hopkins was again more influential in fostering the belief among university administrators that the status of their institutions was dependent on publicizing the research results of their faculties. ⁵⁵   Indeed, it is significant that when the University of Chicago was organized in 1893, a university press was incorporated as one of the four major divisions of the institution. President William Rainey Harper ranked publication   the equal of research and teaching at the new university. ⁵⁶

            In addition to Cornell, Hopkins and Chicago, Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, Sewanee, Howard, Columbia, Northwestern, North Carolina, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard all organized university presses by 1919. ⁵⁷ Most were relatively small operations designed to emphasize the more abstract publication function than the profit-making business of printing for paying readers.   In fact, distribution was largely carried out through gift and exchange, a practice that helped to augment the collections at many university libraries but which did not disperse copies of the books much beyond the scholarly community itself. ⁵⁸   The early university presses tended to issue monographs, specialized studies, and series of scholarly books that could never have been published by the trade. The University of California Press, for instance, had twenty-three different monograph series by 1913 including series in geology, botany, zoology, entomology, archaeology and ethnology, as well as classical, semitic, and modern philology.

            Despite this kind of variety, however, even in the period, 1918 to 1937, university press output still constituted a very small portion of the books published in the U. S.   Robert Frederick Lane reported in the first real study of university presses ever that total title production of all university presses during this period amounted to only 5,382 titles at a time when the yearly output of the trade hovered around the 9,000 title mark. ⁵⁹   Despite the small number of actual titles published, however, university presses did significantly increase the percentage of non-fiction titles they published in comparison with the trade during this period.   Where once they had published only two per cent of all non-fiction titles, by 1937, they were publishing ten per cent of non-fiction titles. ⁶⁰   Clearly, the increase reflects the growth of the knowledge-producing class itself. Still, both the small sales numbers associated with those titles and the fact the 90 percent of all non-fiction continued to be published by the commercial trade suggests that the reading population capable of making sense of such specialized and technical matter remained small.

            These figures are emblematic of a more general situation that challenged the new, professionalized knowledge producing classes as well as the more pragmatically oriented “experts” they trained in their classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. Without reliable means to generate awareness of and support for their activities, they could not easily insure their financial support.   More to the point, if they wrote for and communicated only with each other, they would fail to secure their standing as experts, that is, as individuals with a special competency that enabled them to direct, advise, teach, and control others.   While the professionalizing disciplines could internally credential and thereby authorize their students, they could not legitimate themselves or their claims to special status without the consent of those they aimed to inform, lead, and serve.   As Burton Bledstein has observed:

“Laymen were neither prepared to comprehend the mystery of the tasks which professionals performed, nor …were they equipped to pass judgment upon special skills and technical competence.   Hence, the culture of professionalism required amateurs to “trust” in the integrity of trained persons, to respect the moral authority of those whose claim to power lay in the sphere of the sacred and the charismatic.   Professionals controlled the magic circle of scientific knowledge which only the few, specialized by training and indoctrination, were privileged to enter, but which all in the name of nature's universality were obligated to appreciate.”[90] ⁶¹

            The story of the growth in prestige of the various new “sciences” and the concomitant rise to prominence of the professional expert is a complex one that cannot be told in any detail here. Suffice it to say, however that if a culture of professionalism was to be established, it was necessary, first, to surround all forms of scientific knowledge with a distinct aura.   Then, it was necessary to produce the requisite forms of trust and obligation.   Universities and the disciplines they harbored evolved a whole range of practices that functioned to do both. Technical language and specialized jargon played an important role in constituting the insularity of professionalism.   Similarly, formal credentialing practices like comprehensive examinations, dissertations, medical boards, and the bar examination did much to create the sense that professors, doctors, and lawyers had stepped beyond their peers in their mastery of the difficult and the arcane.   In addition, the numerous ceremonial occasions, awards, prizes, and titles that emerged in academic life during the period 1880-1915 further augmented the sense that academic life and the business of knowledge production were invested with high drama and consequence. ⁶²   The fact that academic and professional forms were widely imitated throughout the culture, giving way to the creation of business, cooking, and secretarial colleges, to name only a few, suggests that these efforts were largely successful.

            Though it is clear that the practices pursued by universities, disciplines, and professions did much to establish their special stature and status, I don't think they would have succeeded so thoroughly without the supporting role played by a burgeoning print culture, itself buffeted by pressures to specialize and professionalize.   Indeed, as I have already indicated, it seems to me that a crucial role was also played by the large literature of popularization that developed amidst the “explosion of language” issuing from U. S. printing presses in the years after 1880.   Indeed, college presidents, educators, engineers, chemists, biologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists and sociologists were all called upon repeatedly as “specialists” and “experts” by the periodicals of the era, especially the new style magazines like McClure's and Munsey's.

            First developed in the 1880s and 90s and reaching their heyday during the Progressive era, these magazines were significantly different from the older, more literary monthlies like The Century , Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly , all of which were associated with the traditional elites of Boston and New York. ⁶³   As Christopher Wilson and Richard Ohmann have shown, the new magazines differed from their predecessors in organization, funding structure, and audience orientation.   Designed deliberately as money-makers, these magazines were underwritten by the advertising revenue they solicited extensively.   That revenue enabled their owners to offer them to subscribers at a nominal fee, thereby exponentially expanding their audience base.   More significantly, however, that revenue effectively transformed the very nature of the magazine business from a textually-oriented literary business to one involved in leveraging print content to gather an audience together in order to deliver its attention to the advertisers who made the whole thing possible.   What this meant, as Richard Ohmann has argued so vigorously, is that these magazines actually invented a new product – the audience's attention – and thus were absolutely crucial to the development of a nationally oriented consumer culture.   They were also significantly involved in the business of class consolidation as a result.   The class they helped to constitute was the professional-managerial class itself, that group of “brain workers” who trained in the new colleges and universities, labored with words and numbers in offices rather than on farms or in manufacturing plants and who moved to the new suburbs.   It was this group, and all who aspired to membership within it, who struggled to keep pace with the growing complexities of modern life and work by seeking to overcome their own narrow specialization by consuming the latest information about the world offered through key agencies of the flourishing print culture. ⁶⁴  

            The new-style, mass market magazines and the large city dailies whose numbers were also exploding during this period were among the first cultural institutions to establish themselves as indispensable guides to the complexities and pace of modern life as well as to the arcana of specialized knowledge production.   Instantiating the modern pace in their own relentless periodicity and in their emphasis on the “news,” both opened channels of communication with regular audiences that had to be filled with constantly changing content.    This led to an eclectic mix of information about modern life, self-help advice, and celebrity gossip, as both Wilson and Ohmann have shown, but it also led to a complex synergy between these new print forms and the emerging experts and specialists who, for their own reasons, hoped for access to a broad general population from whom their client base had to be drawn.   Because the new magazines emphasized the agentive editor and the practice of commissioning pieces on topics generated in the editorial office, they had to give up reliance on submissions that might trickle in from amateurs and unknowns. It proved much more efficient to turn to experts who already had familiarity with some aspect of modern life and to ask them to summarize their particular forms of expertise for a generally educated though neither classically nor technically trained audience.   Thus, while university professors increasingly served on government boards and commissions and testified before legislative committees, so too did they offer expert advice to the public through magazines and newspapers on subjects as diverse as “child rearing, decoration, sports, civic improvements, military preparedness, foreign policy, food preparation, health, morals, and religion.” ⁶⁵

            In offering their more broadly based middle class audiences much more non-fiction, including popularized science, interviews with experts, specialists, and celebrities, self-help articles, and muck-raking investigations of pressing social issues, these magazines and newspapers functioned symbiotically with the apparatus of scholarly knowledge production.   They implied by their practices that knowledge was evolving, that the new was always better than the old, and that the expert was more authoritative than either the amateur dabbler or the generalist. Translating material originally created for highly specialized audiences, the magazines run by Frank Munsey, S. S. McClure, George Lorimer, and Edward Bok did much to enhance the credibility of the expert and the prestige of the various new “sciences” by creating public trust in their ability to make sense of a fast-changing, bewildering, modern world.   They were essential, then, to the establishment of the client base necessary to the practice of the professional expert.

            A further development of and negotiation with this new culture of the expert, what became known as “middlebrow” culture was created when the periodicity and marketing strategies associated with the magazines was allied to new forms of educational and literary expertise and ironically grounded upon an older, Arnoldian understanding of culture as a spiritual guide and source of moral instruction.   Moving to capitalize on the bewilderment many felt in the face of the explosion of print and knowledge production, book publishing entrepreneurs sought to market aids, handbooks, and schemes for ordering, cataloging, controlling, and even countering the new.   They did so by relying on literary experts in the worlds of education and print who were asked to lend their names and authority to cultural materials to be sold as ways to counteract modern anxiety about constant change. As early as 1909, for example, P. F. Collier & Sons relied on the names of Charles Eliot and Harvard to sell a set of classics, which they suggested would ground weightless moderns in the ballast of tradition and provide them with all that an educated man needed to know.   They were imitated by many in subsequent years, including Charles and Albert Boni who teamed up with advertising man, Harry Scherman, to sell cheap sets of classics by mail initially by marketing miniature Shakespeare plays in a box of candy.

            Then, in 1926, in a scheme that effectively consolidated this new middlebrow formation, Harry Scherman created the Book-of-the-Month Club with the intention of selling hundreds of thousands of books to a stable group of magazine-like subscribers by billing his offerings as the “best” books published each month.   In order to better echo the Arnoldian language of the best, that is, of the timeless and the universal rather than the ephemeral and the new, Scherman based his operation on the choices of a panel of literary experts.   He used their previously established legitimacy in academia, in journalism, and in the world of belles lettres to testify to their ability to select the best book published each month for “general” readers who had neither the technical competence to know what the best might be in any number of different fields nor the time to winnow through the vast output of titles issuing from a growing number of publishing houses.   Thus he both countered the threat of the ever changing and the new and adopted it as the basic mechanism of his operation.

            What Henry Canby and his colleagues, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, William Allen White, Heywood Broun, and Christopher Morley, offered BOMC subscribers was a diverse, ever-changing mix of serious but not avant garde literary fiction; biographies and autobiographies of the usual historical figures and statesmen but also of scientists like Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur; popular history and science; and a welter of outlines, summaries, and guidebooks to the new knowledge.   Over the years, the BOMC has been famous for sending out Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Philosophy,   William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , and Carl Sagan's Cosmos .   By issuing books like these alongside quite conventional, story driven novels with some literary pretensions, the BOMC simultaneously authorized the regime of the scientific expert and challenged the legitimacy of university-based academics to define what ought to count as specifically literary expertise.   In effect, though the Club operated to justify the hegemony of the expert more generally, it created competition within the literary field by challenging the authority of academic English departments to determine what it meant to “know” literature or to make proper use of it.

            Disputing the philologists' interest in linguistic origins and source study as well as literary professors' eventual championing of the aesthetics of a modernist literature of bourgeois critique, the middlebrow Book-of-the-Month Club offered its clientele several things.   First, it offered them a view of books as literary material broadly conceived.   That is to say, novels and poetry were not cordoned off as something particularly special or worthy of a different form of attention.   Rather, both were construed, much like biography and popular history, as reading matter, that is, as a tool for providing both entertainment and instruction, both escape and moral enlightenment.   Second, it offered its clientele expert knowledge in the form of advice about what books might best live up to that view of literary material as a means to certain functional ends.   Finally, in selling the books that would deliver the required reading experience, the Club offered its subscribers the promise that they, too, could master the modern world and the difficulty of making sense of it in a universe of exploding information.

            Harry Scherman's operation became so famous in the decades after 1926 that countless marketing schemes offered consumers a range of commodities-of-the-month from religious and socialist books to fruit, flowers and art works.   Similarly, his panel of expert judges was widely imitated, as was his even more famous “negative option” reply card – in which subscribers responded only to a monthly solicitation if they didn't want that month's selection.   One might suggest, then, given this sort of evidence, that the club's influence was a function of its marketing success.   Though this would certainly be correct, it would ignore the fact that the club was also surprisingly successful because it managed to persuade a large population of educated general readers that it offered them something they needed, that is, the expert advice of learned literary specialists who could help them negotiate the world of books in order to gain access to the highly valuable “information” they contained.   Thus they opened a reliable channel of communication between themselves and a reading audience willing not only to rely on that advice but also on the books they recommended, most of which shared a certain ideological specificity.  

            There is neither space nor necessity for detailing that ideological formation here.   Rather, I simply want to suggest in closing that it was this structural relationship with a broad general audience that university-based English professors and their other humanist colleagues failed to establish. Though they could certainly credential their own students, codify their methodological specificities, and couch their research in a technical language quite distinct from the language of everyday book conversations, in their efforts to distinguish themselves from their middlebrow competitors, they disdained everything associated with the Babbitry of the middlebrow.   Thus they scorned the cultural earnestness of book club subscribers and their belief that the literary should be both comprehensible and useful.   At the same time, they increasingly defined the literary in opposition to the commercial, thereby delimiting print and broadcast circuits targeting large audiences as illegitimate and off limits.   As a consequence, they failed to make a larger case in the public sphere for the usefulness of their expertise just as they failed to specify exactly what sort of product they offered to those they would advise, counsel and shape.   Small wonder, then, that the English professor increasingly came to stand in for the fusty academic squirreled away in his ivory tower, writing away amidst his books and the dust.   While some would argue, justifiably I think, that the distance thereby gained from the dominant culture enabled the discipline to function as a source of cultural critique, it seems to me that the recent proletarianization of English and other humanities departments by reliance on adjuncts and graduate students, the proliferation of writing across the university programs, and the shrinkage of department budgets and faculty lines suggest that the faith in humanistic expertise is now at a critically low ebb.   Unless humanities faculties and specialists learn to address a broad, general audience and to make a case for the knowledge they offer, they will be replaced by departments of communication and media studies that can already make some claim to offer specialized and technical knowledge of the technologies of production and transmission that dominate a significant portion of cultural production today and more and more knowledge production as well.

            1. This essay is a shortened and revised version of a much longer chapter on the history of learned and literary culture in the United States from 1880 to 1915 in Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1945, volume 4 of A History of the Book in the United States , edited by David Hall. I am grateful to David Hall, the American Antiquarian Society, and Cambridge University Press for permission to publish this essay.

            2. Henry Seidel Canby, Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York, 1936).

            3. Ibid.

            4. Ibid.

            5. Ibid.

            6. Ibid., p. xii.

            7. Ibid., p. x.

            8.             bid., pp. 197-98.

            9. On the history of the discipline of English, see Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (New York, 1976); Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875-1900,” Criticism 2 (Winter 1985): 1-28; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987); and Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia, 1986).

            10. On the history of the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).

            11. On the history of middlebrow culture and role of popularization within it, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), esp. chap. 5, “Merchant of Light: Will Durant and the Vogue of the ‘Outline.'” 210-65.

            12. The literature on professionalization is vast and impossible to survey here. The sources with the most relevance for the subjects under discussion in this chapter include Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, 1977); and Samuel Haber, The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750-1900 (Chicago, 1991).

            13. On this struggle, see Janice Radway, “The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture and Cultural Authority," South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Fall 1990): 703-36. See also Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature,” esp., 7-20.

            14. I have adapted the phrase, “the ecology of knowledge production,” from Charles Rosenberg, “The Ecology of Knowledge Production: On Discipline, Context, and History,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexadra Oleson and John Voss, (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 440-55. Rosenberg uses the phrase to capture something of the dynamic complexity and multiplicity of relationships among the institutions, disciplines, practitioners, and knowledge forms that emerged in the years between 1880 and World War I. He is especially acute about the need to remember that inasmuch as larger economic and cultural developments affected the nature of knowledge production in this period, so, too, did the nature of the knowledge produced differentially exert its own impact on the institutions and individuals generating it. The Voss/Oleson volume as a whole is still one of the best on the early history of the research university in the United States and the role of the modern disciplines within it.

            15. In addition to the aforementioned Oleson/Voss volume, there is another indispensable guide to the early history of the university in the United States. Notable for its magisterial sweep as well as for its attention both to dominant trends and important exceptions, is Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965). For a less historical and more organizationally focused account, see Edward Shils, The Order of Learning: Essays on the Contemporary University (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997). Other useful sources on the early history of the American university include: Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996); Roger Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 (New York, 1986); Roger L. Williams, The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-Grant College Movement (University Park, Penn., 1991); and Paul Westmeyer, An Analytical History of American Higher Education , (c. 1985; Springfield, Ill., 1997, c. 1985).

            16. On the evolution of American colleges during this period, see The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Matthew Geiger (Nashville, 2000). See also Thomas Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 1865-1912 (New York, 1946).

            17. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, introduction to The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , pp. vii-xxi.

            18. See, for instance, Geiger, To Advance Knowledge , p. 8.

            19. On the history of land grant colleges, see Williams, The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education; Coy F. Cross II, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant College (East Lansing, Mich., 1999); and Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science, Agriculture, and the Mechanic Arts, 1850-1875,” in The American College in the Nineteenth Century .

           20. Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xiii.

            21. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge , p. 5.

            22. See, especially, Veysey's extended discussion in The Emergence of the American University , chap. 2, “Utility,” pp. 57-120. See also Merle Curti, The University of Wisconsin: A History (Madison, 1949).

            23. On the transformation of the conception of learning, see Shils, The Order of Learning, esp. chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 1-70.

            24. Hugh Hawkins, “University Identity: The Teaching and Research Functions,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , pp. 285-312.

            25. Hawkins, “University Identity," p. 289.

            26. In addition to Rubin on the subject of popularization and its importance to the “general reader,” see Radway, A Feeling for Books , esp. pp. 88-94, 101-14, and 235-60.

            27. Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xi. On the financing of the new universities, see also Geiger, To Advance Knowledge , pp. 39-57.

            28. Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xii.

            29. Ibid.

            30. See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982).

            31. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

            32. Ibid., p. 7.

            33. On the subject of the relationship between laborers, managers, and capitalists, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974). On the rise of “brain workers” and their status as a new class, see Barbara and John Eherenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labor and Capital , ed. Pat Walker (Boston, 1979), pp. 5-45. See also Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London, 1996) and Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture (Middletown, Conn., 2003).

            34. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

            35. Ibid., p. 7.

            36. For a magisterial account of the relationship among these various factors and the emergence of a national print culture, see Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture , esp. chap. 2, “The Origins of Mass Culture,” pp. 11-30.

            37. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism , esp. chap. 2, “Space and Words,” pp. 46-79.

            38. Ibid., p. 47.

            39. John Y. Cole, “Storehouses and Workshops: American Libraries and the Uses of Knowledge,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , p. 367.

            40. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University , p. 113.

           41. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge , 14.

            42. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xv, and Veysey, “The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , pp. 51-106.

            43. See, for instance, Veysey's extended discussion in chap. 3, “Research,” in The Emergence of the American University , pp. 121-79. I have drawn heavily on his discussion here.

            44. Hawkins, Pioneer , p. 74; Geiger, To Advance Knowledge, p. x. On the relationship between the university, the developing sciences and journal publication, see also Shils, “The Order of Learning in the United States From 1865 to 1920: The Ascendency of the Universities,” in Shils, The Order of Learning , pp. 1-18, esp. 15-19.

            45. Daniel Kevles, “The Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative Analysis,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , p. 140.

            46. Hawkins, Pioneer , pp. 74-75, 107-12.

            47. Hawkins, Pioneer , p. 75.

            48. Hawkins, Pioneer , p. 112.

            49. Daniel Coit Gilman quoted in John Tebbell, A History of Book Publishing in the United States , vol. 2 of Expansion of An Industry, 1865-1919 (New York, 1975), p. 536.

            50. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge , pp. 32-33.

            51. Ibid., pp. 32-35.

            52. Kevles,”Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities,” p. 152.

            53. On the relationship between speed, periodicity, and mass culture, see Ohmann, Selling Culture , pp. 11-30. For the way this new constellation affected cultural production more generally and middlebrow culture more specifically, see Radway, A Feeling for Books , pp. 168-76.

            54. Hawkins, Pioneer , p. 119.

            55. Albert Muto makes this argument in his history of the University of California Press. As evidence, he cites the comments of both Charles Eliot and Woodrow Wilson on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hopkins. In tribute to Daniel Coit Gilman, Wilson observed, “You were the first to create and organize in America in which the discovery and dissemination of new truths were conceded a rank superior to mere instruction, and in which the efficiency and value of research as an educational instrument were exemplified in the training of many investigators” (Quoted in Albert Muto, The University of California Press: The Early Years, 1893-1953 (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 5-6.

            56. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing , p. 537. On the history of the University of Chicago, see Richard Storr, Harper's University (Chicago, 1966).

            57. . Tebbel, History of Book Publishing , p. 536.

            58. Muto, University of California Press , p. 43.

            59. Robert Frederick Lane, "The Place of American University Press in Publishing" (Ph. D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1939); quoted in Tebbell, A History of Book Publishing in the United States , p. 535.

            60. Ibid.

            61. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism , p. 90.

            62. On the various practices that constituted the aura of professionalism, see Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism , pp. 92-104.

            63. Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens, Ga., 1985); Ohmann, Selling Culture.

            64. On the connection between these new magazines and the professional-managerial class, see Ohmann, Selling Culture , pp. 118-74.

            65. Neil Harris, “Lamp of Learning,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America , p. 435.