Word: lawns
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...Oxbridge's lawns were sites of power assertion; their ideological transfer here brings resonances of sexist structural inequality into our own Yard (see Lawn Lib). The grass has other implications as well, which manifest themselves most clearly when contrasted with the unique position the lawn has assumed within the American Dream...
...Lawns lost their romantic associations with English manor living years ago. The concept of the lawn is now a thoroughly American one and one thoroughly devoid of romance. A mental image of suburbia literally couldn't exist without the lawn (and the fat balding man standing around in his boxers, watering it with a flaccid garden hose, but more on that later) --suburbs were in fact designed around lawns. Jenkins describes the flight to suburbia and the ascendancy of the single-family home with front yard as "the most characteristic single feature of European settlement in North America...
...played (which the government has donated millions of dollars to help improve), go hand in hand. In 1897, a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, linked closely with the U.S. Golf Association, wrote the following influential words: "Nothing is more beautiful than a well-kept lawn . . . Lawns are the most fascinating and delightful features in landscape gardening, and there is nothing which more strongly bespeakes the character of the owner than the treatment and adornment of the lawns upon his place." Indeed...
...keeping up with the Joneses became more important in the "Golden Era" of the 1950s and into the 1960s, spending more time and money on lawn maintenance (and on golf, if you had the credentials to get accepted by a club) became obligatory. [Ed. Note: For those currently striving to fit in, check out the Harvard-insignia golf balls currently democratically available at the COOP for a mere $XXX]. Lawncare became a major summertime preoccupation and a major moneymaking industry. Lawn culture is now the stuff of American iconic legend: through shows like "King of the Hill" and films such...
...defiantly American institution despite its many Oxbridge influences, Harvard is not only part of the lawn-lovin' American Dream, it helps shape it. Emerson's American Scholar address (given in the Yard, perhaps?) and his otheR writings helped define the Dream in its inception. Today, Bercovitch's course The Myth of America analyzes where the Dream went thereafter. The grass is in there somewhere (see Walt Whitman's book of poems,"Leaves of Grass...