Dobson's Encyclopædia
In this era, enterprising American printers were matching their British counterparts in quality and quantity, and severely undercutting them in price.
[2] Purchasers included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.
[4] By the time of Dobson's death in 1823 the Encyclopædia was outdated, and was eventually superseded by the first edition of Encyclopedia Americana (1829–1833).
Dobson did not approve of door-to-door sales, which had been used by his contemporary Parson Weems to sell William Guthrie's New System of Modern Geography and Oliver Goldsmith's History of the earth and Animated Nature.
Like the Britannica, Dobson's Encyclopædia was published in weekly numbers, which could be then bound into volumes or half-volume parts.
Dobson had merely reprinted an offensive article from the Britannica which had been written by George Gleig (later Bishop of Brechin), without checking it for accuracy.
Dobson met this challenge by meeting with the Quakers and printing a rebuttal essay in defense of George Fox's character.
A very detailed account of that war, in both Britannica and Dobson's, makes up roughly the second half of the article "America" in Vol 1.
In addition to Dobson himself, Jedidiah Morse, the father of American geography, made significant contributions; for example, he defended the status of women among the Native American peoples, which had been called "slavish" by the Britannica's editors, most likely James Tytler: We may confidently and safely assert that the condition of women among many of the American tribes is as respectable and important as it was among the Germans, in the day of Tacitus, or as it is among many other nations with whom we are acquainted, in a similar stage of improvement.Morse also disputed the view of the Britannica that the skins and skulls of Indians were "thicker than the skins and skulls of many other nations of mankind".
One notable article is "Pneumatics", which correctly defends Count Rumford's conclusion that water is a relatively poor conductor of heat, which had been criticized by an important Britannica contributor, Dr. Thomas Thomson of Edinburgh.
Almost all the added pages in Dobson's supplement involved American interests, such as expanded descriptions of the states, of New York City and Boston, with hundreds of added cities and locations, descriptions of Indian tribes and their locations and customs, great expansion of American political leaders, an expanded article on the first president, and an entirely new four-page article for Benjamin Franklin.
Dobson's Encyclopædia encountered significant competition from his rival printer, Thomas Bradford of Philadelphia, who proposed in 1805 to reprint Abraham Rees' New Cyclopaedia with American amendments.
Dobson was vulnerable to competition due to two factors: his encyclopedia was beginning to be outdated, and it had relatively few biographies of Americans.
