lectures by such speakers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and was active from 1829 to 1947. In 1838 and 1839, an American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published a fifty-volume set of books called The American School Library. Henry David Thoreau cites the Society in his essay "Walking" in which he jestingly proposes a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. References Citations Sources Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Ian J. Barrow, 'India for the Working Classes: The Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,' Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 677–702. Scott Bennett, 'Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publication and the Mass Market for Reading.' In The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Shattock, Joanne, and Wolff, Michael. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982. pp. 225-57. Mead T. Cain, 'The Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: A Publishing History', Imago Mundi, Vol. 46 (1994), pp. 151–167. Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Monica C Grobel, 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826-1846' (Unpublished MA diss., 4 vols, London University, 1933). Thomas Palmelund Johansen. 'The World Wide Web of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: On the Global Circulation of Broughamite Educational Literature, 1826–1848,' Victorian Periodicals Review 50 (2017): 703–20. Richard Johnson, '"Really Useful Knowledge:" Radical Education and Working-Class Culture 1790–1848.' In Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. by John Clarke, Chas Crichter, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 75–102. Janet Percival, 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1848: A handlist of the Society's correspondence and papers', The Library of University College London, Occasional Papers, No 5 1978, James A. Secord. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. James A. Secord. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-967526-5 Harold Smith. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1846: A Social and Bibliographical Evaluation. Halifax, N.S.: Dalhousie University Press, 1974. Jonathan R. Topham, ‘Science and Popular Education in the 1830s: The Role of the Bridgewater Treatises’, British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 397-430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400029587 Jonathan R. Topham. ‘Publishing "Popular Science" in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain.’ In Science in the