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Noah Webster spent twenty-six years giving a scattered people a common language, and he won. What we are losing now is not the words but the common ground beneath them.

Sourced from the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society, Encyclopædia Britannica, the U.S. Census Bureau's historical statistics of the 1790 census, the New Netherland Institute, and Noah Webster's own Dissertations on the English Language and the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language.

Cover image: frontispiece portrait and title page, Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, New York: S. Converse, 1828. First edition, University of California Libraries copy, via Internet Archive. Public domain.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

October 3, 1803. We remember Samuel Adams as a firebrand, mostly because his enemies drew the portrait and we hung it in the hall. What he actually built was a committee whose only job was to write letters.

Sourced from the Massachusetts Historical Society (John Adams's diary, December 1765), Founders Online at the National Archives (John Adams to William Tudor, February 9, 1819), the Boston Committee of Correspondence's 1772 pamphlet, and histories of the committees of correspondence from Encyclopædia Britannica, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and George Washington's Mount Vernon.

Cover image: "View of Faneuil-Hall, in Boston, Massachusetts," drawn by W. Pierpont, engraved by Samuel Hill, March 1789. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-45571.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.

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September 17, 1787. On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, an eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin asked the room for something harder than agreement.

Sourced from the National Park Service's Independence National Historical Park, the National Archives, James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, and the Avalon Project's transcription of the September 17, 1787 convention debates.

Cover photograph: "Detail, crest rail of the Rising Sun Chair," National Park Service, Independence National Historical Park. Public domain.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.