Wow, that was good. As a clueless teen in Dutch-settled Rensselaer county, NY, bordering Vermont and Massachusetts, I visited nearby New England frequently, by bike and car, then moved there in my early twenties. My curiosity about the roots of the very different present-day cultures on either side of the New York border led me to a study of regional history. In short, the two sides of the border were colonized and settled by people with very different philosophies and politics. New York by royal land grants administered by nobles through a serf-like tenant farmer system that discouraged education (lest they should read the lease) and churchgoing (lest they should band together) and private enterprise (the right reserved to landowners). Dismal unimproved shacks and lack of town centers resulted, and harsh top-down laws prevented good citizenship. New England, by contrast, was populated by Puritan and Quaker descendants with a history of self-governance, land ownership, pride in citizenship and a love of education and church-going. Today, the culture in New York is characterized by tough laws (especially tenant-landlord laws) and policing, gritty towns lacking civic pride, low school funding, and a conspicuous separation of the economic classes. New England now has friendly cops, laws favoring tenants over landlords, town meeting, highly funded school districts, church spires everywhere, and neat, clean towns with town greens and white fences. I guess that wasn’t brief after all. Point is, this book review presents a larger context for all of that. Thank you very much.
Wow, that was good. As a clueless teen in Dutch-settled Rensselaer county, NY, bordering Vermont and Massachusetts, I visited nearby New England frequently, by bike and car, then moved there in my early twenties. My curiosity about the roots of the very different present-day cultures on either side of the New York border led me to a study of regional history. In short, the two sides of the border were colonized and settled by people with very different philosophies and politics. New York by royal land grants administered by nobles through a serf-like tenant farmer system that discouraged education (lest they should read the lease) and churchgoing (lest they should band together) and private enterprise (the right reserved to landowners). Dismal unimproved shacks and lack of town centers resulted, and harsh top-down laws prevented good citizenship. New England, by contrast, was populated by Puritan and Quaker descendants with a history of self-governance, land ownership, pride in citizenship and a love of education and church-going. Today, the culture in New York is characterized by tough laws (especially tenant-landlord laws) and policing, gritty towns lacking civic pride, low school funding, and a conspicuous separation of the economic classes. New England now has friendly cops, laws favoring tenants over landlords, town meeting, highly funded school districts, church spires everywhere, and neat, clean towns with town greens and white fences. I guess that wasn’t brief after all. Point is, this book review presents a larger context for all of that. Thank you very much.