A is for American : letters and other characters in the newly United States
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

A study of the ways in which language was used in the early American republic to define national character and shape national boundaries focuses on the contributions of seven men who worked with alphabets, codes, and signs.

"What ties Americans to one another? Not race, religion, or ethnicity. At the nation's founding, some commentators wondered whether adopting a common tongue might help bind the newly United States together. "A national language is a national tie," Noah Webster argued in 1786, "and what country wants it more than America?"" "In the century following the drafting of the Constitution, Americans from Noah Webster to Samuel F. B. Morse tried to use letters and other characters - alphabets, syllabaries, signs, and codes - to strengthen the new American nation, to string it together with chains of letters and cables of wire. Webster published a spelling book, hoping to teach Americans to speak and spell alike; Morse devised a dot-and-dash alphabet to link the country by telegraph." "Meanwhile, other Americans used these same tools to connect the new republic to the larger world. Caribbean-born William Thornton devised a "universal alphabet," dreaming of making "the world seem more nearly allied." Hartford minister Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet preached that the sign language of the deaf was a divinely inspired "natural language" that could help usher in the new millennium. And elocution professor Alexander Graham Bell was inspired by his father's universal alphabet, known as Visible Speech, to invent the telephone."--BOOK JACKET.