Tag: Noah Webster

Noah Webster: Chronicler of Disease and Epidemics in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Posted on by

As a newspaper editor, he covered the outbreak of yellow fever; as an historian, he searched for the causes of epidemics. Noah Webster was an all-around do-gooder of the founding generation. He is remembered specifically for his blue-backed speller and the leading role he played in the creation of an American dictionary. In the speller,[…]

Noah Webster’s Civil War of Words over American English

Posted on by

Webster saw himself as a saviour of the American language. In the United States, the name Noah Webster (1758-1843) is synonymous with the word ‘dictionary’. But it is also synonymous with the idea of America, since his first unabridged American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 when Webster was 70, blatantly stirred the young[…]