 Written just as he was about to send his two Nicoll stepsons to Yale, it was a manual for teaching young men ethics and moral philosophy, things not taught at a Yale that had reverted to the Puritan curriculum after the Great Apostasy; it was the first work published by an American in a British journal.In 1740s, while Johnson's son William Samuel Johnson was attending Yale, Johnson collaborated with Rector Thomas Clap to create a new curriculum, for which he revised his moral philosophy and his tables on the sum of all knowledge.He published it as a textbook titled "An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy (1743)".