Have Our Manners Gone To Hell?

Not really, says John Kasson, who has studied the career of what we know as “good manners” and finds they are a very recent 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—but for different reasons. Accompanying the story, a selection of excerpts from etiquette books over the years will teach the reader how to greet a lady on the street, how to use a calling card properly, and (in one very early, rudimentary example) how to walk.