The Dictionary Wars by Peter Martin

He who creates the dictionary, so follows the language.  I never thought about it before, but it is a fascinating avenue of great influence.
This book recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. What began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy.
The overwhelming questions in the dictionary wars involved which and whose English was truly American and whether a dictionary of English should attempt to be independent from Britain. There was an intense rivalry between America’s first lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester, who fought over who could best represent the soul and identity of American culture. Webster believed an American dictionary, like the American language, ought to be informed by the nation’s republican principles, but Worcester thought that such language reforms were reckless and went too far. Their conflict continued beyond Webster’s death, when the ambitious Merriam brothers acquired publishing rights to Webster’s American Dictionary and launched their own language wars. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the Civil War, the dictionary wars also engaged America’s colleges, libraries, newspapers, religious groups, and state legislatures at a pivotal historical moment that coincided with rising literacy and the print revolution.