June/July 1986

We talk about it constantly and we arrange our lives around it. So did our parents; and so did the very first colonists. But it took Americans a long time to understand their weather, and we still have trouble getting it right.

For more than 200 years, Americans have tried to change the weather by starting fires, setting off explosions, cutting trees, even planning to divert the Gulf Stream. The question now is not how to do it, but whether to do it at all.

William Auerbach-Levy’s genius as a caricaturist lay in what he chose to leave out.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was wounded three times in some of the worst fighting of the Civil War. But, for him, the most terrible battles were the ones he had missed.

Beatrix Farrand’s exactingly beautiful designs changed the American landscape.

Many Americans, Hemingway among them, thought him a solemn prig. But Emerson’s biographer discovers a man who found strength and music in the language of the streets.

Chaos and farce and catastrophe played a big part. But so did a few men of vision.

71 years ago, a designer working frantically to meet a deadline for the Coca-Cola Company produced a form that today is recognized on sight by 90 percent of the people on Earth.