In 1829
Daniel Webster,
Nathan Hale,
Jacob Bigelow,
William Ellery Channing,
Edward Everett,
Nathaniel L. Frothingham, and
Abbott Lawrence and others founded the
Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, modelled after the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge launched by Henry Brougham and others in London. The Boston society sponsored lectures and published the
American Library of Useful Knowledge. When I wrote this entry in December 2020 I was unable to determine whether more than two volumes of that had been published. Compared to the SDUK the publishing program of the Boston organization appears to have been modest. They continued to publish into the 1840s, but how many works they published has not been easy to determine.