Noah webster writings and biography of michael
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The profits from this publication, at less than a cent per copy, helped support Webster during the later stage of his career during which he compiled the American Dictionary. Though it survived for only twelve monthly issues, it is remembered as one of the most lively, bravely adventuresome of early American periodicals.
His mother worked at home. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. His college years were interrupted by terms of military service.
Language reform
But Webster's principal interest became language reform, or improvement. Conservative contemporaries (people of the same time or period), alarmed at its unorthodoxies (untraditional) in spelling, usage, and pronunciation and its proud inclusion of Americanisms, dubbed the work as "Noah's Ark." However, after Webster's death the rights were sold in 1847 to George and Charles Merriam, printers in Worcester, Massachusetts; and the dictionary has become, through many revisions, the foundation and defender of effective American lexicography.
Snyder, K. Alan. He had, he said, "too much pride to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to learn our children."
Schoolmaster to America
Webster soon developed the first of his long series of American schoolbooks, a speller titled A Grammatical Institute of the English
As he set forth his ideas in Dissertations on the English Language (1789), theatre should be spelled theater; machine, masheen; plough, plow; draught, draft. Written from a traditional American / Christian Perspective.
Pioneer Sholes School - an historic one room country school in Illinois, which is now a museum, showing what country schools were circa 1900.
Courtesy of the
National Archives and Records Administration
. Dissatisfied with the British-made textbooks available for teaching, he determined to produce his own. Noah's was an average colonialfamily. With these and other literary and scientific efforts, Webster stimulated the educational programs of the early American republic.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980.
Webster's other late writings included A History of the United States (1832), a version of the Bible (1832) cleansed of all words and phrases dangerous to children or "offensive especially to females," and a final Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects (1843).
For a time he put forward claims for such reform in his readers and spellers and in his Collection of Essays and Fugitiv [sic] Writings (1790), which encouraged "reezoning," "yung" persons, "reeding," and a "zeel" for "lerning"; but he was too careful a Yankee to allow odd behavior to stand in the way of profit.
He is also remembered for his participation in the fight for an American copyright law, which he personally promoted in the thirteen original states, resulting in its incorporation in the Federal constitution.
A descendent, by his father of John Webster, Governor of Connecticut in 1656, and by his mother of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth in 1621, Webster was born in Hartford, Connecticut, Oct.
16, 1758. In The Prompter (1790) he quietly lectured his countrymen in corrective essays written plainly, in a simple and to-the-point style. It was the most popular
American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.
In 1789, Noah married Rebecca Greenleaf. He
also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like "skunk" and "squash".
In range this last surpassed (went beyond) any dictionary of its time.