Noah Webster History – Noah Webster House

Noah Webster: Biography, Education, Facts, History, Dictionary, Quotes (1999)
Noah Webster, Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education". His blue-backed speller books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read, secularizing their education. According to Ellis (1979), he gave Americans "a secular catechism to the nation-state."

Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.

Webster was born in the Western Division of Hartford (which became West Hartford, Connecticut) to an established family. His father Noah Sr. (1722–1813) was a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster; his mother Mercy (Steele) Webster (1727–1794) was a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony.[4] His father was primarily a farmer, though he was also deacon of the local Congregational church, captain of the town's militia, and a founder of a local book society (a precursor to the public library).[5] After American independence, he was appointed a justice of the peace.[6]

Webster's father never attended college, but he was intellectually curious and prized education. Webster's mother spent long hours teaching her children spelling, mathematics, and music.[7] At age six, Webster began attending a dilapidated one-room primary school built by West Hartford's Ecclesiastical Society. Years later, he described the teachers as the "dregs of humanity" and complained that the instruction was mainly in religion.[8] Webster's experiences there motivated him to improve the educational experience of future generations.[9]

At age fourteen, his church pastor began tutoring him in Latin and Greek to prepare him for entering Yale College.[10] Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday, studying during his senior year with Ezra Stiles, Yale's president. His four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War and, because of food shortages and threatened British invasions, many of his classes had to be held in other towns. Webster served in the Connecticut Militia. His father had mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but he was now on his own and had nothing more to do with his family.[11]

Webster lacked career plans after graduating from Yale in 1778, later writing that a liberal arts education "disqualifies a man for business."[12] He taught school briefly in Glastonbury, but the working conditions were harsh and the pay low. He quit to study law.[13] While studying law under future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, Webster also taught full-time in Hartford — which was grueling, and ultimately impossible to continue.[14] He quit his legal studies for a year and lapsed into a depression; he then found another practicing attorney to tutor him, and completed his studies and passed the bar examination in 1781.[15] As the Revolutionary War was still going on, he could not find work as a lawyer. He received a master's degree from Yale by giving an oral dissertation to the Yale graduating class. Later that year, he opened a small private school in western Connecticut that was a success. Nevertheless, he soon closed it and left town, probably because of a failed romance.[16] Turning to literary work as a way to overcome his losses and channel his ambitions,[17] he began writing a series of well-received articles for a prominent New England newspaper justifying and praising the American Revolution and arguing that the separation from Britain was permanent.[18] He then founded a private school catering to wealthy parents in Goshen, New York and, by 1785, he had written his speller, a grammar book and a reader for elementary schools.[19] Proceeds from continuing sales of the popular blue-backed speller enabled Webster to spend many years working on his famous dictionary.[20]

Webster was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the cultural thralldom to Britain. To replace it, he sought to create a utopian America, cleansed of luxury and ostentation and the champion of freedom.[21] By 1781, Webster had an expansive view of the new nation. American nationalism was superior to Europe because American values were superior, he claimed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDF5wb-5PR4

Images:
1. Noah Webster the schoolmaster of the republic, ca. 1891.
2. Noah Webster House in West Hartford.
3. Noah Webster Bible - 1833
4. early portrait of Noah Webster ca. 1798 from Yale University

Biographies:
1. merriam-webster.com/about-us/americas-first-dictionary
2. baltimoresun.com/noah-websters-american-revolution-in-language-story.htm

1. Background from {[https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/americas-first-dictionary]}
Noah Webster and America's First Dictionary
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758, Noah Webster came of age during the American Revolution and was a strong advocate of the Constitutional Convention. He believed fervently in the developing cultural independence of the United States, a chief part of which was to be a distinctive American language with its own idiom, pronunciation, and style.

portrait of noah webster
In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. For more information on this milestone in American reference publishing, please see Noah Webster's Spelling Reform and A Sample Glossary from A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Immediately thereafter he went to work on his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, for which he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, in order to research the origins of his own country's tongue. This book, published in 1828, embodied a new standard of lexicography; it was a dictionary with 70,000 entries that was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well.

One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen—the latter of which he argued was "the old and true spelling" and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)

While Webster was promoting his dictionary, George and Charles Merriam opened a printing and bookselling operation in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1831. G. & C. Merriam Co. (renamed Merriam-Webster Inc. in 1982) inherited the Webster legacy when the Merriam brothers bought the unsold copies of the 1841 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged from Webster's heirs after the great man's death in 1843. At the same time they secured the rights to create revised editions of that work. It was the beginning of a publishing tradition that has continued uninterrupted to this day at Merriam-Webster.

2. Background from {[https://www.baltimoresun.com/noah-websters-american-revolution-in-language-story.html]}
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: In reading a short biography of Noah Webster, I was impressed by the number of languages he learned (27?) in order to trace the etymology of the words in his dictionaries. Surely with that sort of dedication and passion for the cataloging of words, we who speak American English owe him a great deal. Yes? —Dan Hoffman, Jamul
Yes indeed, we sure do owe Noah Webster (1758-1843) a great deal. He was variously called "Schoolmaster to the Nation," "The Father of American Scholarship and Education" and "The Forgotten Founding Father."
Webster saw the untapped promise of the new republic. He was afire with the conviction that a United States no longer politically dependent on England should also become independent in language. In his Dissertations on the English Language, published in 1789, Webster declared linguistic war on the King's English: "As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline."
In putting his vision into practice, Noah Webster traveled throughout America, listening to people's speech and taking detailed notes. He included in his dictionaries an array of shiny new American words, among them applesauce, bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk — and skunk: "a quadruped remarkable for its smell."
Webster also proudly used quotations by Americans to illustrate and clarify many of his definitions. The likes of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Jay and Washington Irving took their places as authorities alongside William Shakespeare, John Milton and the Bible. In shaping the American language, Webster also taught a new nation a new way to spell. He deleted the u from words such as honour, humour and labour and the k from the likes of musick and publick. He also reversed the last two letters in words such as centre and theatre, and he Americanized the spelling of words such as waggon, plough and gaol.

Noah Webster was truly a Renaissance man, a genius who seemed able to master every field of knowledge he sought to cultivate. In addition to his popularity as a writer of spellers, grammars and dictionaries, he was a publisher, schoolteacher, salesman, lawyer, political theorist and expert on epidemics that had recently swept the United States.
His first fame came to him, at the age of 25, as the author of The Blue-Backed Speller, a book more widely read than any other in America, only the Bible excepted. When the Speller went out of print in 1900, 70 million copies had been circulated.
From 1798 to 1828, Webster devoted himself entirely to what would be the crowning achievements of his busy life, his dictionaries. In 1806 he published his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and for the next 22 years he worked to expand and improve that lexicon, learning 26 languages (by my count), including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and collecting 70,000 words, 12,000 of which had never been in a dictionary before. Webster published the result, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828, when he was 70.
Perhaps the most enduring gift that Webster brought to the art of lexicography (dictionary making) was the writing style of his definitions, which were more clearly and directly expressed than those reposing in any other dictionary, British or American. Until Noah Webster's work, the great lexical authority was the Englishman Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which Webster criticized for its imprecise etymologies, erratic definitions and irrelevance to American vocabulary and idiom.
Shortly after Noah Webster's death, on May 28, 1843, Charles and George Merriam, of Springfield, Mass., purchased most of the publication rights of Webster's estate. Merriam-Webster has long been the largest dictionary and reference book company in the world, and the massive Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961) is the direct descendant of Noah Webster's mind and spirit.
The name Webster has passed into public domain and become practically synonymous with the word dictionary, as in "according to Webster." But most Americans think that it was Daniel Webster (orator, congressman and secretary of state) who compiled the dictionaries. So let us remember Noah Webster and his unsurpassed contributions to our American language, the man who gave a young nation a voice to sing of itself."

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Who was Noah Webster? - Drive Thru History with Dave Stotts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIuVaQaUHvw

Images:
1. The title page of Noah Webster’s 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language
2. 1958 Noah Webster 4 cent postage stamp - Scott number 1121
3. Noah Webster Jr. sketch

Background from {[https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/language-and-linguistics-biographies/noah-webster]}
WEBSTER, NOAH (1758–1843)
________________________________________
The first person to write a dictionary of American English and permanently alter the spelling of American English, Noah Webster through his spelling book taught millions of American children to read for the first half-century of the republic and millions more to spell for the following half-century.
Born a farmer's son in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster attended Yale College from 1774 to 1778, during the Revolutionary War. After graduating, he taught at Connecticut district schools before studying for the bar. The dismal conditions of these schools, combined with his patriotism and a search for self-identity, inspired him to compose three schoolbooks that, he believed, would unify the new nation through speaking and writing a common language. (Previously, almost all American schoolbooks had been reprints of imported British ones.) Part one of Webster's A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, a spelling book, was printed in 1783; part two, a grammar, in 1784; part three, a reader (a compilation of essays and poetry for children who could already read), in 1785. Webster then left on an eighteen-month tour south to promote his books and register them for state copyright, in the absence of national copyright legislation. In 1787 he revised the Grammatical Institute, retitling his speller the American Spelling Book and his reader An American Selection of Lessons.
He began editing periodicals in New York: the American Magazine for one year (1788–1789) and the pro-federalist American Minerva (1793–1798). Between the two came his marriage to Rebecca Greenleaf in 1789, the publication of various collections of essays, and an introduction to his reader, the Little Reader's Assistant (1790). In 1798 he retreated from politics and periodicals to New Haven and helped open a private school there.
After publishing a commercially unsuccessful history of epidemics, Webster began writing schoolbooks with renewed vigor, issuing the first three volumes of Elements of Useful Knowledge (1802–1806). He had obtained national copyright protection for his speller in 1790, when the first national copyright law was passed, a law that granted protection for fourteen-year periods. However, the income from his speller, for which he negotiated a penny a copy in 1804 (the date of his first copyright renewal), could not support his large family, and in 1812 he moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, to economize. He was instrumental there in founding Amherst Academy, now Amherst College. In 1816 Webster sold the entire rights to the American Spelling Book for its third copyright period, 1818 to 1832, to Hudson and Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in order to work solely on his major dictionary. In 1824, with his son William to aid him, he voyaged to Europe to complete it. Titled An American Dictionary of the English Language, it was published in New York in 1828. A year later, Webster produced the final revision of his speller, the Elementary Spelling Book, in conjunction with Aaron Ely, a New York educator. From then until his death in 1843 Webster issued several other schoolbooks and a bowdlerized edition of the Bible. The latter was the fruit of a conversion experience to fundamentalist Christianity in 1807.

Webster's Innovations
One of Webster's most important and lasting contributions to American English was to change, for the better, the spellings of certain groups of words from their British spelling. He used the principle of uniformity to justify his alterations, arguing that words that were alike, such as nouns and their derivatives, should be spelled alike. He therefore transformed words such as honour to honor (compare honorific ), musick to music (compare musical )–the latter a change now adopted by the British–defence to defense (compare defensive ) and centre to center. This last alteration actually violated his own principle–compare central –but brought centre and congruent words into conformity with numerous other words ending -er. Webster also respelled many anomalous British spellings, writing gaol as jail, and plough as plow. Earlier, in works such as the Little Reader's Assistant, Webster had gone much further with his reforms, with spellings such as yung and nabor. However, these had evoked so much ridicule that he soon abandoned them. His ability to introduce his major classes of spelling reform into his spellers and dictionaries was crucial to their success, as they became imprinted on the minds of each new generation.
Webster's second major contribution to American education was in the field of lexicography. Indeed, the word Webster is still virtually synonymous with dictionary. Although Webster issued a small stopgap dictionary, his Compendious Dictionary, in 1806, his masterpiece was his An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, a two-volume work of more than 70,000 entries and the first truly American dictionary. In it, Webster eliminated words that were not useful to Americans, such as words associated with coats of arms, and included those unique to the United States, like squash and skunk.
Webster was not equally successful in all aspects of his dictionary. By modern standards, his etymologies are flawed. His conversion to fundamentalist Christianity had led him to believe in one original language as the progenitor of all the rest, and his etymologies were compromised by his efforts to fit all words into this framework. On the other hand, he brought a new approach to definitions, which were more accurate, comprehensive, and logically organized than in any previous dictionary. His orthography has become standard American orthography. His indication of pronunciations by the use of diacritical marks was also innovative; lexicographers still use similar markings in the early twenty-first century.

Perfecting the Spelling Book For Reading Instruction
Important as Webster's lexicographical work was, his contributions to the spelling book tradition were even more significant. His spellers enjoyed vastly greater popularity than any other of his works. His original speller, the first part of the Institute (1783), sold out its first edition of 5,000 copies within a few months. By 1804 more than a million copies of its revision, the American Spelling Book of 1787, had been printed, most of them in Hartford and Boston. From 1804 to 1818 Webster's account books document the sales of licenses of another 3,223,000 copies. Between 1818 and 1832, the third copyright period, an estimated 3 million copies were printed. Even higher numbers are documented for Webster's completely revamped version, the Elementary Spelling Book of 1829, which he published in response to what he perceived as the slipping sales of the American Spelling Book under Hudson and Company. Between 1829, the Elementary's first publication, and 1843, the year of Webster's death, almost 3,868,000 copies were licensed for sale. Over all its editions, a conservative estimate puts the total sales of the speller at 70 million.
The national popularity and huge sales of Webster's spelling books can only be understood if it is appreciated that they were books designed primarily to teach children to read, and only secondarily to spell, through the alphabet method of reading instruction. The underlying assumption of all spelling books was that "reading" (defined as oral, not silent, reading) was a matter of pronouncing words, spelled aloud syllable by syllable, and that once a word was pronounced correctly, comprehension would follow. Webster's contribution to the spelling book tradition was to indicate how words should be pronounced. He introduced a system of numerical superscripts to indicate vowel pronunciation and altered the syllabification of words to their present format (si-ster now became sis-ter ). In so doing, he improved significantly on his model and rival, A New Guide to the English Tongue (1740) by the British Thomas Dilworth. In his final revision, the Elementary of 1829, Webster replaced the superscripts with diacritical marks very similar to those he had used in his American Dictionary a year earlier–another innovation.

Other Works
A fourth contribution to education by Webster was to originate works that others would improve upon. He had a very large view of American education: He attempted to influence school content, "beginning with children & ending with men" (Monaghan, p. 69) who would progress from the Webster spelling book through other subjects up to the Webster dictionaries. Webster's grammar of 1784 was swiftly superseded by Lindley Murray's grammar, and his revised reader, An American Selection, was also overtaken, first by Caleb Bingham's American Preceptor and later by Murray's English Reader. (The latter would appear in some 350 editions by 1840.) Webster's school dictionaries, his four-volume Elements of Useful Knowledge (1802, 1804, 1806, 1812), his Biography, for the Use of Schools (1830), his History of the United States (1832), and his Manual of Useful Studies (1839) introduced many topics that would later evolve into school staples: geography and history of the United States and elsewhere and (in a primitive form in the fourth volume of the Elements ) biology.

The "First" American Author
Webster was innovative in a fifth arena: he was the earliest American author to make a living from his own publications. He saw as a young man that there was money to be made from a schoolbook and sought protection for his first spelling book even before it was in print and before any state had yet passed laws protecting intellectual property. Webster has become known as the "father of copyright," and indeed he remained active in promoting copyright protection throughout his life. He might with more justice be termed the "father of royalties," as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.
Webster's ability to live from the proceeds of the spelling book was aided by another factor: his extraordinary promotion of his own books. He was the first, but certainly not the last, American author to involve himself deeply in the publishing and promotional aspects of his books. His activities prefigure almost all aspects of modern publishing. His first concern, particularly for part one of the Institute and later for the Elementary Spelling Book, was with the quality of the printed product. He monitored every printer himself, first across New England and then in the middle and southern states. He fussed over every internal detail of the product in an effort to make all his editions uniform across publishers: the spelling, the paper, the standing type. He revised and corrected each edition unceasingly.
His second concern was with promotion. No aspect of it escaped him. As was common practice at the time, he sought recommendations. (Both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington turned him down.) He went on promotional tours, as he did for the Institute in 1785. He gave lectures that brought him to the public's attention; he advertised the series and, when possible, planted "notices" (equivalent to press releases) in local newspapers; he donated his books to colleges and schools; he even gave portions of his proceeds to worthy causes. He was originally his own best agent, and used paid agents only late in his life. Above all, Webster kept an eye out for competitors and did not hesitate to launch stinging attacks, often in newspapers, on his rivals. In much of this, for better or worse, he foreshadowed modern practice.
The view of reading instruction incorporated in Webster's spellers–as systematic, sequential, letter-based, and learned by rote–would not be challenged until the 1820s. The charge brought against all spelling books hinged on the meaninglessness to the child of much of the spelling book's content. Reformers deplored the long lists of syllabified words that children had to encounter before they met sustained reading passages. By the late 1830s the success of the new-style readers, those like the Eclectic series originally authored by William Holmes McGuffey, were rendering spelling books obsolete as reading instructional texts.
Yet the sales of Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, now dubbed affectionately the "blue-back speller" or just "ole blue-back," continued to increase. By 1859, according to Appleton and Company of New York, the firm was printing the speller at the rate of a million and one-half copies per year. For the blue-back speller still had an educational role to play: It lived on for the rest of the century as a spelling instructional text and as the favorite arbiter at spelling bees in and out of school.

Bibliography
Monaghan, E. Jennifer. 1983. A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
Rollins, Richard M. 1980. The Long Journey of Noah Webster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Ltc Stephen Ford:
Noah Webster much to his credit,a teacher, Christian, revising the kjv revised bible,
wrote Websters Dictionary, seemingly no end to his credits.
Thanks for posting,

Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen He was adamant that American students have American books. What red-blooded American wanted to read a book offering loyalty to King George!!!

SGT (Join to see) Absolutely.

My wife grew up in Hartford. She knows it well, Noah and Mark Twain.

1LT Peter Duston Yup, guaranteed field trips in elementary school.