public wnpr, and it's produced in part with support honoring the legacy of frank lord who was our beloved former trustee who was with us through some really rough times at the museum and had showed great leadership and compassion for the museum. so we're very happy to be able to honor him in this way. and now i want to introduce our guests. peter sokolowski is editor at large for miriam webster, and he's just a delight. we've had an interactions with him before and i know you're going to enjoy his company and he's going to be in conversation with jess mchugh author of americannon. she's a writer and researcher whose work has appeared across a variety of national and international publications including the new york times the wall street journal the washington posts and many many others. she's reported stories from four continents on a range of cultural and historical topics from present-day. liverpool punks to the history of 1960s activists in greenwich village, and i have spent some time with both of our guests in the green room and just now early in a techron, and i know you're going to enjoy their company, so i'm welcoming now to the screen jess mchugh. hi, jess. hi, so happy to be here. and i will tell our listeners too. that what time is it where you both are one o'clock in the morning. that is correct. we're doubly glad to have you here and i can't wait to hear what you have to say. so peter, will you let me know when it's time to come back on and help us questions and answers sure. thank you and welcome. this is a treat. it's great to see you again, jess. and yes, we're a little bleary-eyed, but this is a great opportunity to talk about this book and first of all, congratulations for the great reception of this book the great attention that's been paid to it and the story that you tell i i kept thinking when i was reading this book, it's hard to imagine that this hadn't been done before kind of alternative canon and that you have created that that explains so much about history and culture and identity but also about myth. and and yet we're not talking about literature right? we're not talking about the canon with a sort of capital c in the great books sense. and so i do want i'm gonna quote very quickly that from the the little quotation that you begin with. ralph ellison and he says among other things our memory and our history are ever at odds, and i just i love that sentiment because this yeah, it says, you know, this is a story told by inattentive idealists and what interesting way to describe america and and our population inattentive idealists, and i do want to begin with the general and then we'll move to the specific of your chapters, but these ideas of myth and identity and aspiration and even i might say nostalgia which which i got from every one of these chapters some of them i felt quite personally personally things like betty crocker's again, it's your idea. seems like such a big idea and it seems also now that it's come to fruition seems like i'm such a mature idea. how did you come to this way of telling this story which is to say grouping of canonical texts, but that were not literary so-called literary texts sure. so i think maybe just to start with a slight overview of the approach that i'm taking for people who haven't maybe read the entire book yet, but hopefully it once you after this and as you said with the kind of ralph ellison quote, which i use as the epigraph i was interested in in kind of the gap between mythology in the sense of you know, greek mythology a storytelling the stories. we tell about america versus perhaps the way that average americans live and so in wanting to write what for me was a book about average people's lives middle class life in america. i wanted to look not at what we might consider great books, even though i love great books. i love talking about great novels and you know mark twain a lot of people have asked me about why isn't mark twain on the list. why isn't harriet beecher still on the list? when the reason for that, that as you kind of pin to that. the canon of books that i was looking at here is didactic books reference books a book that's teaching you something and so i wanted to look at books that were daily books ones that you would consult every day whether it was a speller or a cookbook or a dictionary if you had more money and so that was sort of the idea if you were an american in 1850 or 1950 and you only owned a handful of books. what were the books and and what did they teach you about what it was to be an american and so i tried to focus on on bestsellers and and on you know, the books that touch the greatest number of people and i came to it by way of noah webster, which was that i was i was interested and this is one of the kind of funny connections between us over the years and merriam-webster's twitter presence in you know, 2015-2016 and i remember hearing this offhand comment and a lecture that no web service and nationalist. i remember thinking i wonder what he would make of this new this new attitude that they have and so that was what led me into writing this article for the paris review about the roots of webster's dictionary and his as we can get into quite a vast agenda that he had for the way that american language could be a sort of a bedrock of an independent american identity. yeah, i mean absolutely and you and i do think it's interesting that you know, the academic canon the literary canon is something that we're we kind of take almost take for granted as a you know as an elevated rare air of culture and yet most of us have experienced many if not, most of these works in ways that you are distinctly not literary and and so, you know this conversation. i think we can go into that that original that first document that first chapter on the farmers almanac something. i was familiar with as a kid in new england seeing it around so they sort of seeing it everywhere and people's bathrooms and it you know and to this day for sure and yet it's something like so many of your choices that we took for granted for so long that i never really thought much about it, except it seemed to always be there and that's sort part of your story isn't it? exactly and in some sense? it has kind of been there almost from the very start of the united states, you know this particular. almanac the old farmer's almanac has the first issue came out in 1792. they published continuously since then i never missed any years and they still sell something like 3 million copies per year, which is just staggering especially when you think about you know, people might not need to have animal mating tables or sometimes and sunset times before their farms, but there's a sense that it's kind of it's functioning again as kind of a vehicle for nostalgia for some people who you know their ancestors used to farm or and they they want to connect back to that or even for us. i feel like it was always in my grandparent's house. it was always in my parents house. it was a part of kind of new england folklore in a sense and and i think as you kind of hint to that what is interesting about this particular book is that it's it's almost a tool more than a piece of literature. it was there to help farmers, you know do everything from grow crops and breed livestock to vote. there were things like how here's where to vote. here's one court. or here's the vacation at harvard and dartmouth. and so the idea really was is it's not just a guide to farming but it's a good guy to citizenship and it's kind of laying the ground for the republican farmer republican in the sense of republic this sort of ideal citizen who is of the land but is also a thinking person and it's it's an idea that persists and is so important to kind of american archetypes. yeah and just comes to mind that you know, the the european model of those who who owned land was very different was you know that they were different classes. they were not the they were not the citizen farmers and the citizens soldiers and the representatives. i think it even the almanac even published the salaries right of the of the congress, which is a sort of charming detail. this is wonderful. so anecdote that you tell of near the beginning of the farmer's almanac of this encounter between i think that the founding editor and a clergyman and there's this quote that i just love the clergyman said that you you seem better fed than taught. could you explain that? it's just so this is actually happened to him, but i could see it happening in in massachusetts in the 1770s. so he comes upon this this clergyman and the road and the farmer doesn't move out in time for him to pass by his carriage and and the clergyman says something to him to the effective. you know, you were better fed than hot and retorts. yes because you teach me and i feed myself. and i think that's sort of the idea of why the farmer resonates so much because we've had this connection in american imagination and in american reality to some sense that landownership is equated with freedom and independence and it's also equated with kind of voting power and economic power and there was this idea but you know as we're cultivating this supposedly empty land which of course it's not empty. they're kind of growing the seeds of liberty and this new republic as they kind of till their fields. and so it's this notion that farming is not just for oneself or for one's family even but for one's country and this is i think the farmers almanac might not have been likely way even wasn't conscious of that but it's very much present in the way that they present how farming works and what it's there for. yeah, and and that's that's such a beautiful allegory of this this kind of new ideal of a citizen and you can draw a line from this far citizen farmer to you know, libertarian ideals to today and it's just such a you know, a resonant part of the book as another anecdote that i just can't let a couple of them with farmers almanacally taught for a long time one was about abraham lincoln's use of all i mean the farmers thought i feel like i could have written an entire book about the farmers almanac. there's so much history there because it's been there since the beginning but yeah, there's this this lore and it's that when abraham lincoln was a young lawyer he was defending a person who's accused of murder and the primary witness said, yes, i saw this person kill this other person and i saw him by the light at the moon and in this, you know dramatic flourish lincoln whips out his old farmers almanac and says, i think you'll see here that there was no moon that night and the whole case falls apart and he wins and her just you know, there are so many moments that the almanac and interacts with american history in so many ways beyond the daily life of farming. there's also this case and i think that maybe you were gonna get to as well and in the 1940s the only time that the almanac almost stops publication is because a german spy gets off of a u-boat in i think it's manhattan or he's anyway, he's captured in penn station and the only book that he has on him is the old farmer's almanac and so, you know the sensors fear that they're the nazis are using the almanac to plan and attack on the united states because the forecasts are done a year in advance the editor at the time said he thought they were more concerned with the tide tables for submarine attack. but anyway, the forecast was switched to general predictions and the almanac saved. so i was looking as well. but i mean that's i mean there's two movies screenplays right there. and i mean, it's really the and i mean it's to your credit that something that we have taken for granted is such a vivid, you know a vivid source of of information and history now your next chapter is on webster we and we have to give a little prior to print place to know webster given our audience tonight. and of course who who we are partly because i just learned this about you. i think you're one of the kind of people. you've said who as a child would read the dictionary. is that right? that is right. quite a nerdy child this multiplies many in audience and i wanted to seem smart and to be smart, but especially to seeing smart and so i had the collegiate weren't married monsters collegiate dictionary and i would read it before i went to bed because i kind of thought that this was the way to be educated or to seem educated but really what it led to me doing was just mispronouncing a lot of words. and so i remember reading a sign to my parents and saying oh look, it's a pedestrian crossing and turning around saying what? so yes kids out there read dictionaries before you go to sleep. yeah, you know, it's it's a it's a funny thing. there are i think there's just two kinds of people in the world people who read the dictionary and people who don't it's just that simple, but when we get when we talk i love this and i love that that the roots of the story goes so deep with you that makes sense given, you know, given the way that you've told the story and and so webster himself is just a fascinating american character without question. obviously, we understand that he did an important thing, but he also embodied important things, you know, he was an idealist. he was a christianist if you if you will, but he was also a federalist. i mean he was a he was a hard-nosed political thinker and all of those things again, we can see in contemporary culture and yet he also had this passion for language. so could you just talk a little bit about the maybe the aspirations of webster and that ended up being expressed in a book that was essentially written for the aspirations of a nation? exactly. yeah, i think you know webster is so endlessly fascinating in the books that he wrote to me are so compelling and that's what really brought me into this. subject matter was that and as i said, i had had this long relationship with the dictionary, but i hadn't thought about it as a book that was written by a person with a goal in mind. and so i was quite surprised to learn that for webster, you know, making the speller and then the dictionary was this sort of linguistic declaration of independence from britain. it's the the post-revolutionary era and he's saying, you know american english is going to be as different from british english as you know, swedish is from german and this is the way that we're going to have a christian and a patriotic language, which is such a radical idea for what is the same language, but he's saying through spelling through standardization and through this sort of ethos that we can imbue our scholarship with in having a literary, you know, i could see him projecting these great literary dreams for the united states. it's such a young age is kind of extraordinary and i think you can make the argument that maybe we didn't go quite as far as swedish, but there are certainly in many differences and i would argue that many of them are fundamental to the way that we conceive of our identity whether it's you know, the amount of biblical language that's used public speech or just the way that so many of the examples tie together these ideals of the kind of post-revolutionary era and in terms of you know the aspirations of americans this truck accord with people who said yeah, you know, we did just beat this empire. we need to have our own language and then throughout history. you see many many other people picking up this book with different aspirations. so, you know frederick douglass uses one of webster's later spellers to teach himself how to write which is you know, and then he becomes this great aurador in this order and this great writer and there are many people throughout history who realize that the dictionary and language and speaking well is a way to a better life, especially i would argue in the 19th and early 20th century. yeah, i mean no question and compelling and of course we could talk all day about webster and all of his controvers but among other things he obviously as you just said so perfectly he sought with this project a sort of national identity and there was a linguistic part of this too that we all recognize. i'm just for the benefit of our audience. i'll say it very quickly that webster's is maybe best known linguistically for the the spelling changes and and that he brought to english or rather the sort of settling of an american style of spelling that we recognized today all of us. he thought he was simplifying things. i think i would argue he complicated them because now we're all responsible for understanding two different sets of spelling conventions the you and color and honor and humor of the letter z or z for a word like civilization or analyze the terminal k and a word like music or public and and especially the the subtle he hated webster hated silent letters and he hated double letters which are kind of the same thing. and so the inflections the verb to travel for example would be traveled with a single l in american english with two l's and in british english canceled that kind of thing so many different changes that we associate with webster, but also webster had this weird. capacity for prediction that in that preface to his 1806 edition. he says that american english which again in 1806 we were in you know agrarian nation that was sort of on in a weak position internationally certainly economically and militarily we had barely survived the election of 1800 politically and yet there's webster writing that the american variety of english will be the dominant one and that it will be spoken in his words by 300 millions of men which in 1806. it is quite an accurate prediction. but there's one thing i'd like you to speak to a very briefly about webster, which is this connection in his work and in his life, he was a product of the enlightenment to be sure but also a product of the american second grade awakening he was itself described a born-again christian and there was a great deal of of christian message in the in the text of his dictionary, but beyond that this another connection, which is that if you and it maybe you should tell the story but if someone were to buy copy of that 1828 dictionary today, in fact simile. they would have to get it where? from a bible says he yeah, it's quite funny the christian homeschool. ing group has really taken or has taken to this book for quite a long time seeing it as kind of the only or one of the only christians early christian american texts. and so there's a bible society that has digitized the entire original 1828 dictionary, which is what 70,000 entries or something like this and it's for a researcher like myself. it's hugely helpful and and kind of surprising and i'll also i would love to hear you. tell that story about the question that you get asked for people about reprinting it. oh, yeah, i mean and that comes back to the the very first a book book fairs and conferences that i attended for merriam-webster often standing at a table or little little book stand in a suit and happy. answer your questions as i could but it there was a little pattern and i learned a lot and i was a huge education doing that kind of thing and one of the questions i got on a regular basis right away that perplexed me was someone coming up and saying do you have the original 1828 dictionary and of course, we're marrying webster. we were selling our newest and best dictionaries and it never occurred to me that we would sell an older one and and i remember distinctly one person said, well, i want it because it's the only dictionary based on the bible which is a fascinating turn of phrase to me because of course for example, samuel johnson paid close attention to the bible, but webster, perhaps more close attention or more more deliberate reference to the bible and the fact is i'm glad that there is a way to see those entries and it's i think it's webster 1828.com or something is it's a wonderful website i use it. i use it every week for sure. so webster has a legacy not only with merriam-webster the company in springfield that's still produces dictionaries, but that original one is still has life in it today and a great deal of use now. i i think we could talk forever about webster, but i can't we have to move on to benjamin franklin. one of the great characters in american history to be sure and someone who's such a huge figure of in our political history that i think some people might forget that he was also a great author hmm, definitely and so, you know his he wrote many things during his life. he also wrote an almanac and he was obviously he made his money in printing would she also wrote for as well but his autobiography which is published posthumously is i i think you know one of the first if not the first kind of rags american rags to riches to l, which is you know, he's recounting his story from being what is it the the the youngest son of the youngest son for five generations back something like that all that to say he had no inherited wealth and comes as it comes up as a candle maker so makers son. and so i was i was interested in the autobiography because you know, it might not seem like of the same genre as the dictionary but in some ways is a reference book, i would you and it is also in some ways the first self-help book because of this section about the 13 virtues where he's saying if you want to be a good person if you want to also, you know kind of raise your station in life. you should follow your progress of these 13 virtues every day and it's things such as temperance and humility. the humility as is the 13th because somebody says you're too proud. maybe you should and and so the idea is that through these small kind of behavior modifications you can have you can have a better life or you could have a franklin-esque life, which is a debatable promise but is is one that is inherently so tempting and one that has enticed so many people this book continues to be on i think something like 400 plus syllabi each year in colleges in high schools and you know elon musk cites this book as part of his coming up as does. i think andrew carnegie or a carnegie. i'll have to check which one also dale carnegie. so i think it's it's the rise. it's the rise of the american people that that are so fascinated with yet in this poor boy who makes good sort of establishes a kind of american ethos of success, doesn't it? and i mean, i do think that is a distinctive. american a trait it. we don't see it in other cultures in exactly that this way and yet it's funny because you also cultivated this sort of country persona this sort of well, you can explain better his appearance in the french court. for example. yeah. this was one of my favorite kind of franklin episodes. i mean as you said he's about kind of flying the striving american in the best sense of the term and he says, you know, we're the middling or his editors as where you're part of the middling people who are gonna make up this new world and but one of the things i was interested in franklin because there's been so much written about his money virtues and as many acts and i was curious about about kind of maybe the the not the artful dodger side, but the kind of mischievous side of franklin and the role-playing side of franklin. so for instance when he sails to france in in 1776 to solicit funds for the revolutionary war from louis to 16th. he dresses as the sort of frontiersmen that the french imagine americans to be so he has these simple quakery clothes and he has this martin fur cap that he brought from canada because this is not a thing that he wears and he's got his spectacles on and so he to the french is so charming. they're charmed by his kind of you know, new worlds kind of renaissance man backwoods charm. so to speak even though he's really none of those things except for a renaissance man, and he charms the cord. he apparently maria antoinette supposedly had a crush on him and it really is this effective role-playing and i think that is one of the things that gets overlooked in franklin's legacy is is this fake it so you make it kind of notion, especially in the 18th century. when america was more up for grabs than arguably by the 19th century or now when it's much much harder to just kind of claw your way up whereas and franklin sarah. it felt more possible than i think other times and i assume i'd just occurred to me now. i assume he was familiar as jefferson certainly would have been with russo with roosevelt's writings who which were kind of in some ways the underpinnings of american political independence and later the french revolution, but also this idea of the tabula rasa and the the sort of pure natural states of and so that he of people before they were corrupted by culture or society and that i wonder i wonder if part of franklin's performance wasn't also kind of a sort of bringing to life of the rousseau ideal. yeah, i could definitely see that he certainly was you know, that that exactly that i do have tabular rosa that you can just kind of create and he also reminds me of kind of golf mid and sociology this notion of a man of many masks and it doesn't mean that he's being false necessarily. he's just kind of wearing the franklin that is the most profitable social or politically or financially for him in any given moment. whether it's franklin the spectacled scholar or franklin the man who loves the good french party or you know, what have you and i think that's that's part of his term and it's why he feels i think like such a modern sounding father compared to some of the others. is this sort of chameleon-esque quality that he has and so i will pass on to i want to briefly mention this the mcguffey reader which is a it to new englanders less known certainly was not known to me and turns out to have been a massive. success in education and this of course education was a concept of a one of webster's preoccupations and one of franklin's as well and the mcguffey reader in the middle west and the far west was much more prominent and for decades if not longer and before we moved to catherine beecher, i just would say if we should say a few sentences about how important a textbook can be. yes, exactly. so so the mcguffey readers were written by you know, william holmes book up. he was some help from his younger brother later on, but he's kind of the typical man of the frontier. and so we're kind of hitting on a lot of the archetypes, you know, you've got the self-made man you have farmer and now you have the frontiersman so mcguffey goes up on what is then the western frontier, but what is now, you know, pennsylvania, western, pennsylvania, eastern, ohio or southern ohio anyway, so he grows up and a log cabin that his parents have have constructed out of the surrounding trees and he's walking five miles to get schooling or he ends up, you know teaching a classroom full of 50 people when he's 14 years old. he lives this kind of hard scrabble life, and so he ends up writing this this book of you know, school books that or meant to educate children from learning the alphabet all the way up through to kind of reading passages for high school age kids and his idea was if you wanted this mix of kind of what he would call frontier values or we might call frontier valley's american values kind of, you know kids out. out in nature a is for acts instead of a is for atoms fall as it was and say come with some of the more calvinist texts, but he like a webster and like many of the other kind of writers of school books is very staunch in his religious beliefs. and so his notion is that we're going to make a more literate nation. we're also going to make a more godly nation and so he has a bit of a fire in brimstone edge to him and he takes many many students out of his classroom as a professor, but the book, you know is an extraordinary bestseller, especially at a time when literacy is really taking hold in the united states and the books come out in 1836 1837 for the original editions and over the course of the next century. they sell something like a hundred thirty million copies and which is just staggering especially when you think about the fact that most copies were shared by several children in a classroom. so the number of people that this is russians is is much much greater, people are memorizing these judges, and i think are in many ways committing that moral compass to themselves and and there's people like henry ford who read it and say everybody of my generation could repeat these passages by heart because it was the book that everybody read. i mean and bringing it. i mean again, it makes this contemporary resonance so easy. i think that people today may mistake the power of a textbook because they think it might still have the power it once had to shape the culture to shape a society in the ways that he absolutely did with his with his work and i i suspect that a single textbook won't have that kind of influence, you know in the 21st century right and in it's fascinating though because people approach the question of textbooks with the same zeal. i think that they did even in the 19th century which is to say if you open up the page of the new york times today or the atlantic there are still there are op-eds about what's being taught in texas or critical race theory or and so i think the idea of how are we teaching our children is such a huge question because to so many americans and people around the world. it's not just about teaching letters and numbers and how to read about educating people on what values they should have and how they should be american. so i think it's it just continues to resonate. yeah. well the whole idea of standards needless to say is always in the news basically and that was that was at the core of mcguffey and also just a very quickly you your chapters speak to each other in some ways. i mean mcguffey adopted webster's spellings and because of the popularity of the mcguffey reader that was a way to propagate webster's innovations in a way that webster himself could not have done and also, of course webster and franklin were personal friends and so there are there so these chapters sort of, you know fold on each other a little bit which yeah kind of like, especially in the 19th century. you kind of realized that the world of writers and of kind of movers in the political world was often quite small. i remember being so surprised going through many many mcguffey letters and finding this letter from webster saying thanks for using my speller and or thanks for using my spellings like this is very important and then he grants his acts about you know, my publisher's not paying me enough money and this very funny letter, but i think it does speak to the when you then on top of webster's enormous success with his own speller plus the dictionary plus now you have mcguffey using these same spellings. it really cements not just their practice, but the ideology to a certain extent that's behind them. yeah, and they're enormous influence now to i would i don't want to, you know, go to questions before we discuss, you know, catherine beecher emily post and betty crocker's toward women, but also written by them. so catherine beecher the women's home. yeah, so catherine beecher, you know sister older sister of harry beecher stowe and and they write this the american woman's home together, but at that point catherine has already quite a renowned. activist for education and she's also her uneducator herself and the idea. is that the way that women can contribute to the american project is by kind of this position through this notion of republican motherhood, you know, raising and teaching the type of men who will become the leaders of tomorrow. so to speak and this is a theme of house with free books and it also kind of continues through and resurfaces in times of crisis. and for instance, you know, we see a lot of these same themes surprisingly come up and better the betty crocker's cookbook in american history, you know, i think it's sold something like 75 million copies and and betty crocker's ways forward in american society that are quite limited in these textbooks because you know, the didactic books that are directly at women are really about women's role in home and women's role in the private sphere because up until you know, even if there are women many women working outside of the home in the 19th century even in the 20th century the best-selling books the ones that are selling tens of millions of copies are aimed more at women at home women raising children, which i think you know in some ways reflects the time and in other ways can be quite limiting but much to say there. yeah. i mean she sort of imposes this morality on dumbesticity exactly which is a which is i have to say a pervasive idea. it seems to me to this day. there's a hugely influential idea and i'm not sure it's shared in the same way in other cultures european cultures at all. yeah. i think that's an excellent point because you know beecher says quite explicitly, you know, if you're feeding somebody soggy biscuits, they can't be a good republic. and again when it's over republic and betty crocker's cookbook baked goods to the baked sale. you might be frowned upon. yeah. no, i mean these values seem to have really stuck and now talk about a screenplay emily post and and the way that her career began as a kind of matron of society and then became kind of a documentary of that society. yes, so emily post was probably one of my favorite chapters to write other than no webster because her life was just so surprising. you know, i she's writes this book about etiquette. that's this huge bestseller, and i had always imagined her with the kind of white gloves and the perfect little life and in some ways that was true. you know, she grew up very posh and was you know, the son of or sorry to hear the daughter of quite a wealthy people, but her her writing career was born out of scandal her husband cheats on her with many show girls, and he's eventually caught in this tabloid extortion scheme and instead of you know, paying the ransom so to speak he goes to court in this very public legal fight that emily posters then caught up in and the early 1900s and she decides in 1906 to divorce her husband, which was not done for the upper classes were really for many people and she then it's kind of faced with the prospect of earning her own money because in addition to being a philanderer her husband had made some some poor business choices, and so she turns you kind of correcting the wrongs of etiquette after living through some of them herself and and in turn is picked up by both middle class and kind of rising working class people who want to make a better life and see this kind of great gatsby vision of if i can memorize these rules about fork placement and etiquette. i can be more successful and that's something that takes off when the book comes out in the 20s and continues to resonate throughout the 20th century. i mean, it's the perfect aspirational text right because she's basically saying and it i mean it it's it's very much based on class in education sort of the description of the manners of the wealthy becomes the prescription for everybody else right and and in some ways that parallels the usage guides for language, you know, and the way that we judge people by their accent or their grammar and that kind of thing and it's interesting that those those kinds of judgments and that prejudice some people say that for example, linguistic prejudices the last sort of socially acceptable one, but it's it's interesting to me to think that the the groundwork for that the background for that the reason it has such power isn't just because of noah webster's because of emily post and these other reflexes that were broadly cultural, but you could apply them to manners to cooking to language, you know education to clothing. yes, exactly, and i think it goes back to that classic, you know descriptivist versus prescriptivist debate and i think it's very prevalent in the way that i conceive of american society is or these writers are these books best sellers because they're describing things as they are or are they best sellers because they're describing people scrubbing things as people would like them to be and i think that's that's part of it is that there is always a grain of truth, you know in in what people are saying, but there's a much much faster aspect that is about aspiration. is this kind of american dream of you know, if you can just do these small things you can have everything you wanted or you can have more than your parents had and this is kind of inherent in emily post book as much it is and as it is in webster as much as it is in the old farmers almanac to be honest, it's it's this promise of more of better. yes, absolutely, and there couldn't be a better way to sort of segue to questions from jennifer. and our audience because that was such a beautiful response yet and and to lead us into just you know, deeper discussion of all of your chapters, jen. thank you so much. i got to tell you i could listen to two of you talk i for hours and hours. this has been just absolutely fascinating and so much fun. so the audience please you're a little i think you're all kind of stunned and odd as i am, but we need some questions from you, but i will start off with them kind of a broad one. i actually know a lot about emily post and have a lot of research about etiquette her book and one of the things that distinguishes it. from other advocate guides is humor, and it is so so funny and she did that very deliberately. i think to make it more relatable as we say these days wait that word, but can you talk about in other books that are featured in american and the role that humor might or might not play in in some of them? that's a great question. i've actually never gotten this question before and i think it's such a good point and because i do think humor plays such a important role on american society and you do see it throughout, you know, whether it's the the kind of clergy quip and the almanac or ben franklin is somebody i think of is quite humorous and he uses it to many effects. so i think one of the things that that humor can accomplish is it can kind of make somebody seem, you know, like you said more relatable it can also kind of deflect grand jerks. i think franklin for instance was very conscious of he didn't want to present himself in a way that was above the kind of fold. so i think that's one thing that it can also do and it can also kind of bring people together the idea of an inside joke is that you're all sort of in on it and there's a lot of that in these books is that there's repetition of the same kind of poking fun at as emily post would say the gildings or the kind hearted or what happened you and it's in that. yeah. everybody can be in on awesome. thank you for that and while i'm holding the floor with questions, i will we were talking earlier about a little brief appearance by mark twain in your book. can you tell us about that? yes, and i actually realized there are two brief appearances. and so the first one is he writes this very funny satirical essay in the late 19th. no, i you know why there's only so many days i can hold in my head sometime and concentrate. he writes gets satirical essay about benjamin franklin's 13 virtues saying, you know, he wants to make a sense of these little robots. what a boring way to live hebrew and my childhood because i had to read this book and it's very very funny and i think it speaks the way that that franklin is many people throughout his life, you know, as i said, he's a printer he's a diplomat. he's a writer but he saw so many people throughout history the way that he was seen and understood right after his death is quite different from the way that he's understood in the 19th century later 19. century or even now and then the second appearance is i forgot that when harry beacher stowe and catherine beatrice. yeah, catherine beecher are writing the american women's home. they're actually living in nook farm. and so, you know, they would go over and have these kind of, you know, long dinners and discussions about suffrage with mark twain. it was very much this this atmosphere of kind of conviviality and of intellectual exchange that was happening among many people at that time in hartford. thank you for that. and for people who might not know nook farm is the neighborhood here in hartford where both harriet beecher stowe and mark twain and his family lived right across the lawn from one another. so the harry petristo center is now museum dedicated to the heritage does legacy and of course the bartraine has read across salon supporting and furthering mark twain's legacy. so thank you for bringing that up. yes. i can't believe i forgot because i remember doing research on nook farm and now it's all coming back to me. oh well has have you been to have you been to book farm? no, i want to and i love the idea of you know writing on a billiard table. so i'm desperate to visit. we'd love to have human peter. you've been here right the mark twain house. i have driven by i haven't been inside. okay, i have to come by peter and i will take a field trip together. there we go. yes, you are invited anytime and we're gonna hold you to that. so thank you and i know jen matos is gonna pressure you too peter on that one. so, so connie robinson in our audience says were there others that you considered writing about in this book and i would add did why did you not and yes and that's yeah, that's there were many that kind of went on and off the list. it's very hard and as i say convinced in the instruction, i don't mean for this book to be kind of inexhaustive list of all of the books that served this purpose, but i wanted to kind of focus on you know, a kind of a survey of books from the beginning of kind of america united states history up until say the 80s and 90s. so there were a few one that sticks out to me was the big book of alcoholics anonymous which is actually quite a huge bestseller. it's told something like 30 million copies and and what was interesting to me was the ways in which you know, it comes out in the 30s. it's responding to the great depression. it's also responding to a lot of veterans from world war i who are struggling with alcoholism, but it paints quite a communal nature about the ways in which american communities should function which i think is sort of a different message that you get from from the notion of individuality that we see in so many texts the reason why i ultimately didn't include it was just because i thought that bill wilson who wrote the book and helms found aa wasn't really thinking about an american project in the way that someone of these other authors were i'm trying to think there was another one. oh doctor spots baby book. that's a big one, which is a big bestseller, but it was just i thought the message was too similar to the betty crocker. of each other and it just seemed hard to have two chapters that were so close when i own i'm trying to cover so much time in quite a relatively short book. that's a really good answer now forgive me if this is not something that you wanted to talk about peter. you didn't include it on your list, but everything you wanted to know about sex, but we're afraid to ask is one of the books that even included in this it can talk a little give us a little bit of context there and and i would never have considered it in this context until sure. yeah, because i was interested when i first started doing this project back in 20018 2017 about how to books that was kind of the overarching thing. so what are the things that people really want to know how to do they want to know how to spell they want to know how to act and they want to know how to have sex is something that comes up and so i was curious about that and i also couldn't ignore the fact that this book the 1969 everything you always wanted to know about it sex, but we're afraid to ask is a huge bestseller. it sold something like a hundred million cop. which is quite wild for the number of similar books that came out and and what surprised me with with. that one is that it's it's quite a conservative take for a sixties book and a lot of it is about right and wrong ways of doing things. there's a lot of kind of gay shaming. there's also a lot of you know against racial mixing as he says and so i think the notion of conservative in the sense of trying to conserve something was surprising to see in in such a kind of recent text and sort of disappointing, but i think it also speaks to the fact that even books that we might not think are talking about good or bad or right or wrong or american or un-american or in many ways speaking to that. so for instance sex advice and this book in particular often comes out of kind of not him, but it comes out of the history of eugenics. so the first sex manuals were about the positive if the negative side of eugenics, what was get a eugenics is sterilizing people positive eugenics was encouraging the quote unquote right people to have sex and that's kind of how sex advice in america is grown and same in the uk and so i was interested in that notion. wow, yes, quite enjoy but especially what seems like a silly book, but well, i mean really they even the title alone kind of suggests that it's going to be a little tongue and cheek or you know, right but it's it really isn't she that's fascinating. yes mating. peter was there a book that you would have liked to have seen included in in american that has not. putting on the spot. i know. yes. no, i hadn't thought of that probably my thoughts first go to an encyclopedia, which is a different kind of aspiration. the world book was very important to to me and you know, i would read the world book in much the way that jess was reading the dictionary and it was clear that world book for example was designed specifically for this aspirational purpose and to the extent. i mean it sent a lot of people to college for sure who and and sort of was easy enough to read for an elementary student but felt grown up and somehow that was the aspiration too. and so that's that's what i would think about well, and you know, you're so right. my parents bought us the entire world book encyclopedia, and they also bought the special shelf bookshelf that you could buy right and it was on display in our front. hall the minute you walk in our front door. that's what we saw and so that it was clearly symbolic for them. yeah, and that way too. that was a really good answer. yeah. i also have a question for peter if there is no questions in the hopper. yeah, no right ahead, please because this was one that i think about a lot and get asked from time to time. and so i i live in france and peter also has a kind of french connection and in writing a french dictionary and spending a lot of time here. and sometimes i get asked the question of do you think it will be possible to write this kind of book about a different country would they have different types of touchstones? and you know, do you think there's something uniquely american about this type of book and the way we use it even more specifically the way that we use a dictionary say strikes me as different than the way that the french do. oh, absolutely. i mean you i think you could do a parallel book, but it would it would not touch. you know what i'm saying? it would be it would be for sure because i mean the french for example have you know, they they're the french academy which i think is is very misunderstood by many people, but it's certainly what it underscored was identity identity identity when it was formed french was spoken by a small minority of the people living in france at the time and by by world war one the officers often couldn't communicate with their own troops. i mean because there was such diversity as you think as you see in germany in italy for example and yet france today is unbelievably standardized as a language french is a language is standardized and that was an absolutely deliberate political act of both louis the 14th and napoleon for two kind of different reasons and then the revolutionaries for a third different reason, which was the sort of alitarian ideal of the citizen and so again a different story a different identity a different ideal, but certainly you could create a kind of mythology of identity a national identity through texts. that would go from the academy's dictionary to you know mcrae and you know the mcrane mysteries which were so wildly popular in france to depict the middle class. but also this idea of you know independent think thought mmm the great answer. wow. so we're talking about books and writing and of course one of the things i always say is the mark twain house is a writer's home and a home for writers and i always like to get a good writing question in so just can you tell us a little bit about your research slash writing routine or your approach to writing a book like this? sure, so i always i love the research more than the writing sometimes and i think you know getting to talk to people like peter and you know getting to travel around was the best part i got to do this kind of long road trip. this is pre covid and go to some of this more far-flung archives like the old farmer's almanac is in this small town called dublin new hampshire and emily post is up in burlington vermont. and then the the betty crocker's publications in some way and so i got to meet for instance of the betty crocker's. um, do you have opportunity or are you to do well i um, yes, and and they really comes out in two different ways what there's a number of sort of what i would call academic articles that i've published through an academic journals like the dictionary society of north america's journal called dictionaries, and i've published a number of articles there and book things like book reviews surveys of french french references, and i'm something i'm very proud of fairly recently from the oxford university, press a chapter on the revision of webster's dictionary in 1864 that which was research that i undertook along with my my former boss and retired merriam webster president, john morris because we it's an interesting point and it's i think it's worth saying out loud that to have a job as an editor at marion webster. you don't actually have to know anything about noah webster's work. i mean we concentrate on today we concentrate on the now but both morris and i took an interest in our history and especially around 2014 when we saw a an anniversary year of the 150th anniversary and we just decided you know, what did we what what was that revision? what did it amount to and so we did our research and in other words what we did was reverse engineer. the process that was done by our forebears in other words open up the old edition the webster 1828 and the new one and compare them and and then kind of figure out what was done. it turns out we were both astonished that it was a massive and significant and deeply detailed revision. and so i have a nice chapter on that called the invention of the modern dictionary in a book and the book is called the whole world in a book which i think is a great title. i'm sorry, i do get it but i was gonna say the other thing is most of my writing is anonymous because it appears on the merriam-webster website and very happy to say that that website is a place for just not just word lovers to and the curious about the current events, but or the problems of english, but it's kind of a magazine for word lovers and so you might encounter an article on why the word mustache is singular in english or the difference between iniquity and inequity and those are pieces that i write that's my day job, and i'm very proud of the fact also that we don't have bylines in those articles because like the dictionary which the definitions are written by us by our colleagues, but we don't see bylines in the definitions. so we decided we're not going to put bylines on those articles so i do get to scratch the itch of being a writer quite a lot maybe more than people think of even if they know me, but that is my day job for the most part and most of those articles are of course on time, but they're on the website. i'm so glad to have learned that thank you for those articles are am an avid reader of basically all of them. thank you. thank you. that's amazing. i can't imagine i just this has been the most lovely evening and i want you both to promise to come to hartford and you visited the obviously the noah webster house, but i want you to come and see us here at the mark twain house and we'll take you across the lawn to here it beat your stowe's house and and have a good old time. thank you both so much for delightful evening. now, i got to say i can't imagine that if you didn't already want to purchase this book before this conversation that you're not itching to do. so now my friend and colleague jack has reposted the link in in the chat. so please take it to advantage of that opportunity and i want to thank our co-hosts knowing webster house for joining us this evening and thank you to all of you who have made donations to be split between the two organizations. this has been real battery evening. thank you so much both of you. thank you jennifer. thank you, jess, and congratulations again. thank you. thank you here. here. thank you, jennifer so lovely. the shorting bloomberg in 1995 peter robison has served as a london correspondent seattle bureau chief and a feature writer for bloomberg business week. he is a recipient of the gerald lobe award the malcolm forbes award and four best in business awards from the