An American Spelling Book

Enter Noah Webster, a young schoolmaster from Connecticut. Webster was looking for a way to finance his legal education, and he was also passionately dedicated to the cause of American English. To help advance these two causes, Webster wrote a spelling book, which he first published in 1783, when he was twenty-five. The spelling book turned out to be a major force in the drive for American linguistic independence. Over the generations, The American Spelling Book was used in numerous editions, and over a hundred million copies of it were sold.

Webster reasoned that accurate and uniform American spelling would lead to uniform American speech, and that uniformity in speech would “reconcile” the people of America to each other.

Webster's first dictionary, published in 1806.

The American Dictionary of the English Language was an incredible accomplishment for one person. His 1806 dictionary had defined 28,000 words and indicated their pronunciation. The 1828 dictionary defined 70,000 words and provided etymologies as well as pronunciations. This was the first dictionary to include Americanisms.

The American Dictionary a\so included the new American meanings of older English words such as congress, court, and plantation, and settled for all time the changes in word endings that distinguish American from British usage: -er for -re (center rather than centre); -or for -our (favor rather than favour); -c for -ck (music rather than musick); -ck for -que (check rather than cheque); -ize for -/'se (legalize rather than legalise); and -ler for -ller (traveler rather than traveller). The 1828 dictionary decided firmly that Americans would spell and pronounce the name of the newly produced metal aluminum (the British favored aluminium, like sodium and potassium). We say skedute rather than schedule because Webster thought the pronunciation of schedule should follow the example of school.

For all of its eccentricities, then, the American Dictionary was a landmark in the development of American English.

American literature of the second part of the 19^th century.

"America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms. " The high expectations for an American literature of the first rank were finally justified.

It was a time when the American landscape and American culture would finally find their place in a native and original literature. Writers of the time were aware of this, and they sometimes used the word renaissance to describe the phenomenon.

The American Renaissance was not literally a "rebirth"; rather, it was an equivalent to the earlier European Renaissance, in the sense that it marked the arrival of cultural maturity.

This was the moment America had reached, at least in its literature. The confidence these writers felt in the vitality of their time is evidenced in the remarkable body of work they produced. In the period from 1849 to 1855, the following works were published: Emerson's Representative Men, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Thoreau's Walden and Whitman's Leaves of Grass —enough masterpieces for any national literature.

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