TY - THES
AU - Courtney Fullilove
AB - This dissertation investigates the constitution and fate of "useful knowledge" in nineteenth century America. It argues that useful knowledge was a political economic program of research and development and a way of describing the wide-ranging social practices of knowledge making it channeled and transformed. The dissertation tracks the progress of useful knowledge along two lines. First, it assesses federal efforts to promote "science and useful arts" directed by the U.S. Patent Office, describing how the constitutional mandate for property rights in invention both justified and effaced the global collection of natural resources for American territorial and economic expansion. Second, it investigates how these efforts crossed, represented, and reconfigured technical knowledge-making practices, arguing that commercial, scientific, and legal rationalization was less an indication of progress than a provisional response to persistent conflict over claims to authority. By focusing on the bureaucratic, material, and social components of making and sharing knowledge in 19th century America, this study describes how ideologies of innovation and property grounded in assumptions about human creativity and natural inexhaustibility legitimized extractive habits of development and enabled fantasies of technological perfectibility and limitless supply. Together these accounts provide a revised history of innovation and a social history of knowledge production in nineteenth century America.
LA - English
M3 - Ph.D. Dissertation
N2 - This dissertation investigates the constitution and fate of "useful knowledge" in nineteenth century America. It argues that useful knowledge was a political economic program of research and development and a way of describing the wide-ranging social practices of knowledge making it channeled and transformed. The dissertation tracks the progress of useful knowledge along two lines. First, it assesses federal efforts to promote "science and useful arts" directed by the U.S. Patent Office, describing how the constitutional mandate for property rights in invention both justified and effaced the global collection of natural resources for American territorial and economic expansion. Second, it investigates how these efforts crossed, represented, and reconfigured technical knowledge-making practices, arguing that commercial, scientific, and legal rationalization was less an indication of progress than a provisional response to persistent conflict over claims to authority. By focusing on the bureaucratic, material, and social components of making and sharing knowledge in 19th century America, this study describes how ideologies of innovation and property grounded in assumptions about human creativity and natural inexhaustibility legitimized extractive habits of development and enabled fantasies of technological perfectibility and limitless supply. Together these accounts provide a revised history of innovation and a social history of knowledge production in nineteenth century America.
PB - Columbia University
PY - 2009
EP - 389 pp.
TI - The Archive of Useful Knowledge
ER -