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This book tells the dramatic story of how Americans thought and argued about the English language between 1776 and 1900. The rise of a popular democracy in the early nineteenth century rudely challenged gentlemanly assumptions that only the well-educated should be able to speak in public.
The populist challenge tipped over into discussions about how grammars, dictionaries, and even the English Bible should be written. Should these texts celebrate slang and colloquial English? Or should they reflect the refined and literary? What, after all, should be the idiom of a democratic society?
In its original form as the author's Ph.D. dissertation, this book won the 1986 Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
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