A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (review)

In her prologue, the historian Jill Lepore describes A is for American modestly as "a collection of character sketches" in which she has "attempted to take the likenesses of seven men" who each "explored the idea that letters and other characters—alphabets, syllabaries, signs, and codes —hold nations together" (11). With the earliest born in 1758 and the latest dying in 1922, these seven—Noah Webster, William Thornton, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Sequoyah, Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell—span the long nineteenth century and exist tantalizingly in varying degrees of separation from one another. This group portrait creates a sort of fantastic "Alphabetical Club," which shaped the idea of America as surely as Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club" shaped American ideas. In our current moment of medial transition, these alphabetic activists seem especially resonant: Webster, Morse, and Bell—bywords of the first information infrastructure, even as it begins to fade from view. Gallaudet and Sequoyah are equally important for language consolidation within deaf culture and Cherokee culture, respectively. Representative in another way, the African Muslim slave Abd al Rahman Ibrahima's story uncovers the racial politics of English literacy, which whites were naturalizing as a marker of full humanity in the American nineteenth century.

A series of Venn diagrams—ora Dickensian plot outline, full of unlikely meetings—would show the striking number of shared networks across nineteenth-century American culture that these characters (and each is one, in the colloquial sense) inhabit. For they are linked not only because of their innovations in language and communication technologies but also through a variety of other affiliations. To note just a few of these inter-connections: William Thornton, the author of an important essay on the alphabet, is kin to the inventors Bell and Morse not only through a shared interest in codes and signs but also through his technocratic position as the first superintendent of patents; three of these seven men married deaf women; Morse's transition from painting to telegraphy owes something to his disappointment at being rejected as a muralist for the Capitol Rotunda—designed by William Thornton; Samuel Morse's father, Jedidiah Morse, was an important geographer in the early republic, and later in the century Alexander Graham Bell would found the National Geographic Society.

Lepore does not, of course. pursue or analyze every theme that these coincidences suggest, but rather focuses largely on the narratives of national identity fostered by these men. And yet these multiple linkages powerfully undergird her story and are suggested through the very act of bringing these figures together, by, as Lepore puts it, "commit[ing] acts of juxtaposition" (11) . These minibiographies demonstrate the way in which technological innovation in the nineteenth century was intertwined with the arts and with the full sweep of political culture. At stake were not only state policies (e.g., should communications technologies belong to the government?) but also the politics of slavery, of benevolence, and of pedagogy, and, more abstractly and perhaps most importantly, the politics of representation. Furthermore, since professional, artistic, and academic "disciplines" were not roped off as they are now, much of the creativity of Lepore's seven emerges precisely from the relative freedom with which nineteenth-century men could perform the "second acts" in their lives. Their inventiveness was generated by both the correspondences and the friction between their different enterprises: Morse constructed a prototype telegraph from the literal remnants of his painting career: canvas stretchers; Thornton's universal alphabet was as much an exercise in visualization (the "reduction of language to the eye" [48]), as was his architecture; Bell's transmission of vocal sounds through wires emerged from his work with the deaf and the contemplation of the biomechanics of hearing.

The book's opening gesture characterizes its method: In a prologue titled "A Likeness," Lepore envisions Noah Webster sitting for his portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1823. Webster, then 65, was renowned...