Snow in America

by Bernard Mergen

In this first cultural history of snow, Bernard Mergen explores our ambivalent relationship with nature's crystalline gift. Drawing from works of art, poetry, literature, film, history, and public policy, the author demonstrates how Americans have loved, hated, measured, depicted, and frolicked in snow for over three hundred years, attaching to it a host of shifting meanings and metaphors. Snow in America begins with the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster over the nature of winter weather. Mergen's discussion encompasses the great storms of American history, the development of snow shovels and the evolution of snow management, the politics of snow removal, snowballs, snowmen, snow sculpture, avalanches, the evolution of ski resorts, the origins and development of snow measurement, and snow terminology.