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Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843 he was considered an American hero. Noah did not like American schools. Sometimes 70 children of all ages were crammed into one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers and their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, he wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Most people called it the "Blue-backed Speller" because of its blue cover. For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He felt that all Americans should speak the same way. Noah helped to start Amherst College |