2025 Theses Doctoral

Becoming Useful: How 19th-Century New York and Philadelphia Institution-Builders Formalized Knowledge, Education, and Character Formation

Bangs, Tessa Ann

In the nineteenth century, institution-builders in New York and Philadelphia formalized an idea of what knowledge and education were by defining what exactly useful knowledge and useful education consisted of and were used for — and what they were not. These ideas were not agreed-upon understandings: they were arbitrary and subjective. These definitions included the drawing of lines of inclusion and exclusion; institution-builders delineating them made value judgments about who could learn, teach, and accredit both useful knowledge and useful education. Different kinds of institutions had different goals, processes, and identities in mind.

Through learned societies such as the American Philosophical Society, leaders defined American useful knowledge as a hybrid of the useful and the ornamental on the one hand, and of the arts and the sciences on the other. It was the practice and application of knowledge that made it useful, rather than either of these categorical binaries. In New York, founders of the New York Institution and officers of the New York Society Library considered the centralization of culture and knowledge, viewing their institutions as both cultural and educational; founders of the University of the City of New York sought to create a bridge between the Old and New Worlds through their modern urban university, a model of useful education that encompassed more types of knowledge and students, with usefulness determined by the institution’s connection to the urban public of its leaders’ choosing.

And through institutions such as debating societies and industrial education organizations by and for women, leaders created skills-based institutions that combined useful knowledge and useful education: with knowledge for professional life and education for industry at the institutions’ centers. In these institutions, it was the members themselves who became useful. The founders of these institutions redefined utility so as to allow their members access to these American processes: processes that determined the defining of what useful knowledge and useful education were, and whom they were by and for.

This project, in the traditions of the history of education and American Studies fields, relies on archival collections, which themselves are manifestations of the lines of inclusion and exclusion that are baked into knowledge institutions. These institution-builders formalized knowledge and education production in the United States by defining useful knowledge and useful education, materially and organizationally, making claims to production processes and collective identities in the process. They defined American usefulness through the individuals performing and producing this knowledge and education, as well as its application: if the knowledge, education, or practice in question was applied for utility by those deemed knowledge and education producers, then it was American useful knowledge and education. This was formalized through the building of their institutions; this process was an accreditation of knowledge and education — itself a claimed responsibility — and a legitimation and reinforcement of these individuals’ own authority over such matters: authority that was claimed, arbitrary, and exclusionary.