Reserve your spot at www.noahwebster.yapsody.com

Early Americans universally celebrated liberty.  The white men among them probably enjoyed more of it than any other people of their time.  Yet even they distrusted liberty so much that they seldom allowed the word to go around unchaperoned.  Orators, writers, politicians, and clergymen typically assigned “liberty” an adjectival minder: “ordered liberty,” “rational liberty,” “Christian liberty,” “temperate liberty.”  The liberty Americans lauded had no resemblance to individualism, and it had absolutely nothing to do with license.  The right kind of liberty was really self-government, “a freedom within bounds” set by laws, founded on property ownership, and ideally guided by virtue.  Washington and Franklin, towering model citizens, personified American liberty as it should be.

This series of lectures will explore how the Revolutionary generation—Noah Webster’s generation—defined the purposes and prospects of their new nation. Noah will make occasional appearances; he played a considerable part in creating a distinctive national culture. But the talks won’t foreground him, nor will they bask in nostalgia for a simpler, more hopeful age. Studies of the past inevitably reflect the present; they can also illuminate paths into the future. While focusing on Revolutionary Americans’ thinking about the promise of the United States in its childhood, we will consider as well how much of their vision has survived, how much ought to be preserved, and why.