Issue

H. T. Webster’s cartoons offer a warm, canny, and utterly accurate view of an era of everyday middle-class life

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?

The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.

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.

The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally, he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.

Another frontier closes as the mapping of America approaches completion.