<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> In the hands of a rococo Yankee named Clyde Fitch, the American stage came of age with a gasp of scandalized shock</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">With astonishing tenacity, the people of the rich river-mouth region of the Mississippi have remained what and where they are through two and a half centuries</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Our fascination with categorizing ourselves was fed in 1949 by a famous essay and chart that divided us by taste into different strata of culture. Now the man who invented these classifications brings us up to date.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The author of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ never set foot on our shores, but he had a clear and highly personal vision of what we were and what we had been</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Today more Americans live in them than in city and country combined. How did we get there?</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Had Thomas Morton raised his maypole anywhere but next door to the Pilgrims, history and legend probably would have no record of him, his town, or his “lascivious” revels.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The modern city plays host to conventions and tourists, but it still retains the slightly racy charm that has always made it dear to its natives.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For generations, it was the mainspring, the proof, and the reward of a civilized social life. Now, a fond student of the ritual looks back on the golden age of the dinner party and tells you just how you should have behaved.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">What seemed to be just another tempest in the teapot of academia has escalated into a matter of national values and politics. Who would have believed that the choice of which books Stanford University students must read would create so much tumult? And that the controversy goes back so far?</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For a century now, it has been a haven to some, an outrage to others, and it is one of the very few social institutions that have survived their founders’ world.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For more than a century now, American homeowners have been struggling to remake their small patch of the environment into a soft, green carpet just like the neighbor’s. Who told us this was the way a lawn had to be?</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A controversial recent book suggests that what we think of as good manners is a relatively new thing, a commodity manufactured to meet the needs of an industrial age. But, now that the Industrial Revolution is over, we may need them more than ever, for very different reasons.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The word emerged during the Depression to define a new kind of American adolescence, one that prevailed for half a century and may now be ending.</span></p>
