Noah webster writings and biography of martin

Webster's Reader also contains an idealized word-portrait of Sophie, the girl in Rousseau's Emile, and Webster used Rousseau's noahs webster writings and biography of martin in Emile to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education. They had eight children:. Webster joined the elite in Hartford, Connecticutbut did not have substantial financial resources.

In December, he founded New York's first daily newspaper American Minervalater renamed the Commercial Advertiserwhich he edited for four years, writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of articles and editorials. As a Federalist spokesman, Webster defended the administrations of George Washington and John Adamsespecially their policy of neutrality between Britain and France, and he especially criticized the excesses of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror.

As a result, he was repeatedly denounced by the Jeffersonian Republicans as "a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot", "an incurable lunatic", and "a deceitful newsmonger Pedagogue and Quack. For decades, he was one of the most prolific authors in the new nation, publishing textbooks, political essays, a report on infectious diseases, and newspaper articles for his Federalist party.

In Webster wrote two massive volumes on the causes of "epidemics and pestilential diseases". Medical historians have considered him as "America's first epidemiologist". Webster was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Inhis noah webster writings and biography of martin moved back to New Haven, where Webster was awarded an honorary degree from Yale the following year.

InWebster was elected to the American Philosophical Society. As a teacher, Webster grew dissatisfied with American elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses. They suffered from poorly paid staff, lacked desks, and used unsatisfactory textbooks imported from England.

Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing the three-volume compendium A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller published ina grammar published inand a reader published in His aim was to provide a uniquely American approach to education. His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation.

He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions. The Speller was designed to be easily taught to students, progressing according to age.

From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought that the Speller should be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation. He believed that students learned most readily when he broke a complex problem into its component parts and had each pupil master one part before moving to the next. Ellis argues that Webster anticipated some of the insights currently associated with Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Webster said that children pass through distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex or abstract tasks. Therefore, teachers must not try to teach a three-year-old how to read; they could not do it until age five. He organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words, then sentences.

Over the course of editions in his lifetime, the title was changed in to The American Spelling Bookand again in to The Elementary Spelling Book. Most people called it the "Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue cover and, for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time; byit had sold 15 million copies, and some 60 million by —reaching the majority of young students in the nation's first century.

Its royalty of a half-cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. It also helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees. As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones. Most of them already existed as alternative spellings. He also changed tongue to the older spelling tungbut this did not catch on.

Part three of his Grammatical Institute was a reader designed to uplift the mind and "diffuse the principles of virtue and patriotism. Several of those masterly addresses of Congress, written at the commencement of the late Revolution, contain such noble, just, and independent sentiments of liberty and patriotism, that I cannot help wishing to transfuse them into the breasts of the rising generation.

The Reader included two, original, fan-fiction sequels to Emile or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseaua portrait of Rousseau's character, Sophie, and a tribute to Juliana Smith who had recently rejected Webster's romantic advances. Webster's Speller was relatively secular. As Ellis explains, "Webster began to construct a secular catechism to the nation-state.

Here was the first appearance of 'civics' in American schoolbooks. In this sense, Webster's speller becoming what was to be the secular successor to The New England Primer with its explicitly biblical injunctions. Later in life, Webster became more religious and incorporated religious themes into his work. Vincent P. Bynack examines Webster in relation to his commitment to the idea of a unified American national culture that would stave off the decline of republican virtues and solidarity.

Webster acquired his perspective on language from such theorists as MaupertuisMichaelisand Herder. There he found the belief that a nation's linguistic forms and the thoughts correlated with them shaped individuals' behavior. Thus, the etymological clarification and reform of American English promised to improve citizens' manners and thereby preserve republican purity and social stability.

This presupposition animated Webster's Speller and Grammar. Byhe began work on a more extensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Languagewhich took twenty-six years to complete. His goal was to standardize American English, which varied widely across the country. They also spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently.

Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in January in a boarding house in CambridgeEngland. As a spelling reformerWebster preferred spellings that matched pronunciation better. But he was also the driving force behind universal education for all citizens, including slaves, females, and adult learners. Speaker of twenty languages, he developed the new country's curriculum, writing and publishing American literature, American history, and American geography.

He published New York City's first daily newspaper. As editor, Webster conducted a study and linked disease with poor sanitation. He created the country's first insurance company, established America's first copyright law, and became America's first best-selling author. Noah Webster's name is now synonymous with the dictionary he created, but his story is not nearly so ubiquitous.

His "blue-backed speller" for schoolchildren sold millions of copies and influenced early copyright law. But perhaps most important, Webster was an ardent supporter of a unified, definitively American culture, distinct from the British, at a time when the United States of America were anything but unified-and his dictionary of American English is a testament to that.

A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English In The Dictionary Wars, Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.

But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language. The overwhelming questions in the dictionary wars involved which and whose English was truly American and whether a dictionary of English should attempt to be American at all, independent from Britain.

Pioneer families on the frontiers taught their children to read from it; in the schools it was a basic textbook, and in settlements and villages its lists were read out for lively spelling matches. Bywhen the total population of the United States was about 23 million, the annual sales of Webster's spelling book were some 1 million copies, and the figures increased yearly.

An active Federalist, Webster became a pamphleteer for centralized government and wrote his Sketches of American Policyproposing the adoption of a constitution. The difficulty of copyrighting his works in 13 states led Webster to agitate for many years for a national copyright law; it was passed in In he left Hartford to support Washington's administration by editing the New York's first daily newspaper, American Minerva later the Commercial Advertiser ; he was also editor, at various times, of several magazines.

Webster also wrote scholarly studies on a great diversity of subjects, including epidemic diseases, mythology, meteors, and the relationship of European and Asian languages. During most of his later life he lived in New Haven, Conn. This was a very controversial time in his life. According to his diary, he went to his father to ask for financial assistance, and his father, in effect, turned him down.

His diary offers a running account of his romance with Becca in the spring of They had a normal two year courtship and were married in Romantic letters from Noah to Rebecca, attesting to their loving relationship, are part of the historical collections at the Noah Webster House, as well as the Webster ring. The center of this ring contains hair, believed to be that of Noah and Rebecca.

On the back an inscription reads:. Since he could not go into law immediately, Webster went into teaching. In those days most potential lawyers did not go to law school. Webster did this with Ellsworth. Inhe taught in the West Division and lived in this house. During that winter, we get the first glimpse of the Noah Webster to be. Elementary education was in a deplorable state.

The one room school house was a very poor system of education. Most teachers were discouraged by the situation and so was Webster, but unlike most others, he sat down and wrote an essay. Throughout his life, whenever he saw something that he felt needed correction, he wrote something about it in the form of an essay. He saw this as a challenge.

Webster felt that Americans should have their own text books, and that they should not rely on English textbooks. He also felt that Americans should have copyright laws to protect authors.

Noah webster writings and biography of martin

He believed that Americans should have their own dictionary. He continued to study law, passed the bar in and returned to teaching, this time in Sharon, CT and later in Goshen, NY. Spellers were text books that taught students how to read, spell and pronounce words. Most educators believed that children did not need to understand what they were reading, so teaching was done using recitation and memorization.

Most spellers used in America were from England and taught English pronunciations, geography and historical facts. Now that America had won its political independence, it now needed to win its cultural independence. Noah thought that Americans needed their own speller that would teach American ways and instill a sense of pride in the new nation.

He scoffed at English textbooks which did not contain words that were purely American or American geography. In the book Noah implemented changes that helped to improve the teaching of pronunciation, spelling and reading. As a result, our country is most homogeneous in terms of spelling and pronunciation. He would ask each to introduce him to someone else, thereby getting introduced to all the important people of that time.

His used this huge list to influence the publisher to take on his project. Throughout its history, between 50, and , copies were sold though Noah never made much money on it. The speller was the number one used school book in America until the end of the 19th center when it was gradually replaced by the McGuffy reader. Noah realized that England and the new United States had different forms of government, institutions, customs and laws.