| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States. By Jill Lepore. (New York: Knopf, 2002. 241 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-375-40449-X.)

Jill Lepore's A Is for American provides a concise, readable account of various innovative technologies of communication devised in the United States from Noah Webster's attempted spelling reforms through the invention of the telephone. Some were ill conceived and went nowhere, like the former; some were epochal, like the latter, even when the breakthrough involved considerable fortuity and consequences unforeseen. 1

Good work has already been done on language reform in the early republic, on Cherokee literacy, on slaves who wrote in Arabic, on sign language and the debate between it and lip reading, on telegraphy, and on the invention of the telephone. But never have those been put under one roof. . . .

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