Sale!

A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States

Amazon.com Price:  $12.61 (as of 19/04/2019 17:53 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they sought how you can bind the newly United States together.

In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore portrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a new nation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts to standardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of “Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’s development of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving his people’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait of a developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores the personalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven men driven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through these superbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by a young country trying to unify its diverse people.
Nativist, xenophobe, and anti-immigration pamphleteer, Samuel Morse was once known in his day for more than the telegraphic code that bears his name–one of the crucial many things we learn from the prizewinning historian Jill Lepore in this vivid study of language and linguistic politics in the early American republic. Morse “never gave up his hatred of immigrants,” Lepore writes, but the entire same nursed hopes that his dot-and-dash alphabet would someway contribute to world peace. Just so, Noah Webster, of dictionary fame and also anti-immigration, sought to lay down rules for a language that would “build Americans’ fragile sense of national belonging,” even as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet sought to provide a language for the deaf, and Sequoyah a syllabary for the Cherokee people that would enable them to take part as citizens in the larger society. Language is power, these reformers and inventors knew. Lepore’s highly readable study of language and its political uses in 18th and 19th century The us gives us a new context in which to believe language-reform movements today in addition to a window into the American past. –Gregory McNamee

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Revolution and Founding » A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States

Recent Products