American Minute - May 28 - Noah Webster & Webster's Dictionary

American Minute
with
Bill Federer

He left Yale for four years to fight in the Revolutionary War.

After graduation, he became a lawyer and taught school in New York.

Dissatisfied with the children's spelling books, he wrote the famous Blue-Backed Speller, which sold over one hundred million copies.

After twenty-six years of work, he published the first American Dictionary of the English Language.

His name was Noah Webster, and he died MAY 28, 1843.

In his 1788 essay, "On the Education of Youth in America," printed in Webster's American Magazine, Noah Webster wrote:

"Select passages of Scripture...may be read in schools, to great advantage.

In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with nearly the same degree of respect."

Noah Webster continued:

"My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality."

In his book, The History of the United States, published in 1832, Noah Webster wrote:

"All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."