Noah Webster, championing the notion that the…

Noah Webster, championing the notion that the US possesses its own distinct language, publishes his two-volume “American Dictionary of the English Language” in 1828 at the age of seventy.

Webster’s dictionary, a culmination of such earlier publication efforts as his popular “blue-backed speller” and earlier series of dictionaries, sells only twenty-five hundred copies, though it will eventually secure an honored place in the history of American English.