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

Nativist, xenophobe, and anti-immigration pamphleteer, Samuel Morse was known in his day for more than the telegraphic code that bears his name--one of the 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 all the same nursed hopes that his dot-and-dash alphabet would somehow 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," while Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet sought to provide a language for the deaf, and Sequoyah a syllabary for the Cherokee people that would enable them to participate 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 America gives us a new context in which to consider language-reform movements today as well as a window into the American past. --Gregory McNamee

• Building the American Republic, Volume 1: A Narrative History to 1877
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
• These Truths: A History of the United States
• New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
• Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)
• Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917
• A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
• Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
• Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (The Penguin History of American Life)
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 (Valley of the Shadow Project)