These days, we talk about design in a broad manner, covering both the aesthetic and the functional, the intentional and the apt. Design goes far beyond pretty. It innovates. It solves. It makes sense. In this we are the heirs of Steve Jobs and many others, including Eliot Noyes, the designer of IBM’s look and feel, its innovative Selectric typewriter, and other symbols of technological progress, as seen in a new NEH-funded documentary discussed in this issue by Menachem Wecker.
One can go back and find others who saw in the creative spark a light to mark the path forward. They tended to be artists. Claude Monet, writes NEH Public Scholar James H. Rubin, “demonstrated . . . the connection between leisure and the modern economy.” His immersive Water Lilies came to symbolize the end of World War I and the triumph of France.
Judith Jones, the subject of a new biography by NEH Public Scholar Sara B. Franklin, stood along a different front between commerce and culture. As an editor at Knopf, she plucked Anne Frank’s diary from the slush pile and talked her boss into taking another look. An avid cook, Jones worked with Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the first of several important cookbooks she helped publish—as Steve Moyer relates.
In the decades following the American Revolution, one of the few books that could be found in a great number of American homes was The Columbian Orator by Caleb Bingham. A compilation of readings to help students speak and write more fluently, Bingham’s book taught readers much more than how to sound elegant. As Danny Heitman notes, the book’s dialogs on the condition of slaves and the United States’ treatment of Native Americans were studied by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who went on to challenge the American system of slavery.
Language, sometimes of the most prosaic sort, is at the heart of an innovative effort to bring the resources of linguistics to bear on questions of legal interpretation, as I report in a feature on corpus linguistics and the law. Its findings have helped shape an increasing number of opinions issued by the Supreme Court. After visiting an academic conference and reading a stack of cases and law articles on the subject, I attempt an introduction to this curious movement.
For something a little more diverting, I recommend the article by Laura Wolff Scanlan on a museum in Illinois dedicated to the legacy of the DeMoulin Brothers. Best known for their band uniforms, the company also produced blankets for circus elephants and a whole catalog of gag products that were used by fraternal organizations to, well, um, lighten the mood.
