This series takes its cue from Thomas Paine, who wrote that “America . . . replenished the world with more useful knowledge and sounder maxims of civil government” than any other society. It is intended to encompass a balanced mix of titles designed to advance a new and innovative approach to scholarship on the contests over knowledge making and the pursuit of informed, democratic citizenship in Thomas Paine’s time, and about these processes’ relevance to our own. It is open to intellectual histories, projects on Indigenous ways of knowing, scholarship that historicizes concepts of expertise, propaganda, and information, and studies that make transparent the methodologies (including digital) that undergird that work.