Liberated Americans were enthralled by what their new country could and would do with what they now saw as “their” language. Noah Webster wrote: “North America will be peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language . . . the people of one quarter of the world will be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family.” This visionary, Noah Webster, was a schoolteacher who wrote a little book, known as the American Spelling Book or the Blue Backed Speller. It sold in general stores at fourteen cents a copy and in its first hundred years it sold
...more
