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Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition

The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is a 29-volume reference work, an edition of the real Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time. This edition of the encyclopaedia, containing 40,000 entries, has entered the public domain and is readily available on the Internet. Its use in modern scholarship and as a reliable source has been deemed problematic due to the outdated nature of some of its content.[1] Modern scholars have deemed some articles as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Additionally, the 11th edition has retained considerable value as a time capsule of scientific and historical information, as well as scholarly attitudes of the era immediately preceding World War I.

Country

United States

British English

11

General

Horace Everett Hooper

1910–1911

Print and digital

Encyclopædia Britannica Tenth Edition 

Encyclopædia Britannica Twelfth Edition (supplementary update), Encyclopædia Britannica Fourteenth Edition (full revision) 

Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition at Wikisource

Contemporary opinions of and ethnicity are included in the Encyclopædia's articles. For example, the entry for "Negro" states, "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts."[23] The article about the American Revolutionary War attributes the success of the United States in part to "a population mainly of good English blood and instincts".[24]

race

Many articles are now outdated factually, in particular those concerning science, technology, and municipal law, and medicine. For example, the article on the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi speculates that it is caused by a fungus, vitamins not having been discovered at the time.

international

Even where the facts might still be accurate, new information, theories and perspectives developed since 1911 have substantially changed the way the same facts might be interpreted. For example, the modern interpretation of the history of the is now very different from that of 1911; readers of the eleventh edition who want to know about the social customs and political life of the tribe and its warriors are told to look up the entry for their king, Alaric I.

Visigoths

The 1911 edition is no longer restricted by copyright, and it is therefore freely available in several more modern forms. While it may once have been a reliable description of the academic consensus of its time, many modern readers find fault with the Encyclopedia for several major errors, ethnocentric and racist remarks, and other issues:


The eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica has become a commonly quoted source, both because of the reputation of the Britannica and because it is now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet. It has been used as a source by many modern projects, including Wikipedia and the Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia.

Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia[edit]

The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia is the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, renamed to address Britannica's trademark concerns. Project Gutenberg's offerings are summarized below in the External links section and include text and graphics. As of 2018, Distributed Proofreaders are working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

Catholic Encyclopedia

New American Cyclopedia

. Everything Explained That Is Explainable: On the Creation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–1911 (2016), ISBN 0307269175, online review

Boyles, Denis

Wallis, W. D. (1911). "Review of The Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition". American Anthropologist. 13 (4): 617–620.  0002-7294. JSTOR 659453.

ISSN

via

HathiTrust

to the Encyclopædia Britannica 11th ed. dated Cambridge November 1, 1910: with separate volumes below in several formats on the Internet Archive:

s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prefatory Note