#noah webster

[portrait-paintings]

Noah Webster

Artist: James Herring (American, 1794-1867)

Date: 1833

Medium: Oil on wood

Collection: National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, United States

Description

Noah Webster (1758 – 1843) is justly considered a polymath for his contributions to a staggering range of fields, including educational reform, antislavery advocacy, epidemiology, journalism, and copyright law. Yet he is primarily remembered as the lexicographer of the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), whose legacy lives on in today’s Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Webster’s American Dictionary surpassed Samuel Johnson’s groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755) by documenting words, idioms, and pronunciations that were unique to the United States. He standardized the simplified spellings that still differentiate American English from British English, dropping the “u” from “colour,” for example.

[icannotbejondenden47]

Almost all civil liberty enjoyed in the world has its basis in the principles of the Christian religion.

Noah Webster 

[wronghands1]

[thatsbelievable]

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

ALEXANDER ANDERSON

In Britain, the great early popularizer of wood-engraved illustrations was Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). In America, it was the physician and wood engraver Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), who was among the earliest of American wood engravers. He was very long-lived and active and his engravings may be found in many American publications throughout the 19th century, especially for the American Tract Society and Noah Webster’s series of Spellers, including this 1848 edition of The Elementary Spelling Book, published in New York by G. F. Cooledge & Brother. As a physician, Anderson is distinguished as the first doctor at what would become New York City’s Bellevue Hospital in 1795. He published as a wood engraver while practicing as a doctor, but devoted himself solely to engraving after 1820.

This edition of The Elementary Spelling Book is identified as “The Last Revised Edition,” which in itself is “an improvement” of Webster’s American Spelling Book that originally began as A Grammatical Institute of the English Language in 1783, was revised as the American Spelling Book in 1787, and had its final revision in collaboration with New York educator Aaron Ely in 1829, a year after Webster published his famous An American Dictionary of the English Language. 

View more posts with wood engravings!

[46ten]

Of Alexander Hamilton, I have never changed my opinion. He was a very vicious, corrupt, ambitious, and intellectually great man - an Archangel ruined.

From Josiah Meigs, Washington, August 21, 1818, to Noah Webster, Jr.

[owlsong74]

webster made several spelling proposals that did not catch on. he wrote in his own simplified system at times.

the Preface and the final few essays in this collection are in his reformed spelling. Extract:

Attach yourselves to bizziness in the erly part of life. Shun idle dissipated karacters az you would the plague. Listen to nature and reezon, and draw just ideas of things from theze pure sources; otherwize you wil imbibe fashionable sentiments, than which a more fatal evil cannot happen to you. You wil often heer bizziness condemned az drudgery and disgrace. Despize the sentiment. Nature speeks a different language. Nature tells you, "that she haz given you bodies, which require constant exercize; that labor or some other exercize iz essential to helth; that employment iz necessary to peece of mind; and industry iz the meens of acquiring property." Nature then haz rendered bizziness necessary to helth and happiness, az wel az to interest; and when men neglect her dictates, they are usually punished with poverty, diseeze and retchedness. It sometimes happens that a man's ancestors hav accumulated such an estate, that he iz wel secured from poverty; but the very estate he possesses, iz the meens of entailing upon him diseeze and all its consequential evils: For a rich man iz strongly tempted to be lazy; and indolence, by debilitating the animal system, destroys the power of enjoyment. Besides, a man of eezy circumstances iz very apt to looze the virtu of self denial; he indulges hiz appetite too freely; he becumes an epicure in eeting, and perhaps a bakkanalian; he iz then a slave of the worst kind, a slave to hiz own desires, and hiz faithful services to himself are rewarded with the gout.

[macrolit]

Literary history that happened on 16 October