Everyone has a Webster. His name, embossed in gold on thick faux leather book spines, shimmers from shelves in nearly every sun-filled suburban schoolroom and cramped office cubicle while dog-earned paperback Websters clutter nightstands and get lost under lumpy dormitory mattresses from Amherst to Berkeley. But who was Webster, and why did he write a dictionary? Why did Noah Webster insist, from the publication of his first spelling book in 1783 until his death in 1843 that Americans needed-desperately, urgently required-their own, national language? The more I learned about Webster, the more fascinated I became by his obsession with the idea that Americans ought to spell differently than English men and women. For God's sakes, why?

But Webster wasn't the only early American to tinker with the alphabet. Strange that historians have never considered him alongside Sequoyah, the Cherokee silversmith who invented an entire writing system-an 85-character syllabary-for his people, at the same time and for much the same reason Webster wanted Americans to spell honour without the 'u': to inspire nationalist fervor. Meanwhile, the first half of the nineteenth century also witnessed famed artist Samuel Morse devising a dot-and-dash alphabet (see images below) that would eventually link Americans to the rest of the world, in the first communications revolution; and evangelical minister Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet using French fingerspelling and the "natural language of signs" to communicate with deaf Americans.

What do all these letters and other characters-alphabets, syllabaries, codes--have in common? They tell the story of how nineteenth-century Americans struggled with what it meant to belong to a nation founded, not on any common heritage or shared past, but on a set of universal principles. Then, as now, what holds us all together was a subject of considerable dispute. "A national language is a national tie," Noah Webster liked to say, "and what country wants it more than America?"

Jill Lepore, February 4, 2002