The Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society will host its Annual Meeting on Tuesday, May 22, 2018, at 5:30 p.m. Both museum members and the general public are invited to attend.
2018 is a notable year of Noah Webster anniversaries. April 14 was the 190th birthday of Webster’s dictionary. On October 16, 2018, Noah Webster celebrates his 260th birthday. And on May 28, 2018, we commemorate the 175th anniversary of Webster’s death.
This year’s Annual Meeting will pay tribute to Webster’s lasting legacy. Following a brief business meeting, author, journalist, and biographer Joshua C. Kendall will present a talk on Noah Webster. His The Forgotten Founding Father (Putnam, 2011), is the most recent monograph about Webster. In it Kendall writes of Webster’s efforts to establish an American lexicon and culture, a legacy we still enjoy today. Kendall will discuss Webster’s fierce support of defining a unified, distinctively American culture, distinct from the British, at a time when the United States of America were anything but unified. Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language is a testament to his longing for unity.
Joshua C. Kendall was born in New York City. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Yale where he studied comparative literature. He is currently an Associate Fellow of Yale’s Trumbull College. His books include, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (Putnam, 2008), The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture (Putnam, 2011), America’s Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation (Grand Central, 2013), and First Dads (Grand Central, 2016).
Following the lecture, guests are invited to partake of refreshments. The event will take place at the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society, 227 South Main Street, West Hartford, CT 06107. It is free to the public and no reservations are
necessary. For further details, including directions and parking information, visit www.noahwebsterhouse.org.
