1 Year Ago: October 2016

Bring people to Christ / Leave them there: One thing I love to do is track back on cultural Quaker turns of phrase. Here I looked at a phrase sometimes attributed to George Fox and find a largely forgotten British Friend who laid much of the groundwork for Quaker modernism and the uniting of American Quakers.

5 Years: October 2012

The secret decoder ring for Red and Blue states: Discussion of the Quaker cultural influence of American voting patterns based on David Hack­ett Fischer’s fascinating (if over-argued) book Albion’s Seed.

10 Years: October 2007

An Autumnal Halloween: A family post, pictures of kids posted to the web long before Instagram was founded.

• Strongtowns blog and podcast. Charles Marohn
• Geography of Nowhere. James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book on suburban sprawl, which I loved at the time.
• The Big Sort. Bill Bishop, 2008.
• The Great Good Place. Ray Oldenburg. Popularized the “third places” concept of places people can gather together outside of home and work (as example: the coffee shop in which we met, Grooveground, didn’t seem to mind six people nattering on about urbanism until closing time).
• Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk, “Your body language shapes who you are” (in our context, we were suggesting a correlation between road rage and the physical poses of driving)
• The End of the Suburbs.  Leigh Gallagher, 2014
• Fighting Traffic. Peter D. Norton
• Wrestling with Moses. Anthony Flint’s 2009 book that goes behind the scenes of Jane Jacob’s planning battles with the near-mythic highway builder Robert Moses, a subtext that underlies Death and Life but is mostly just hinted at.
• Antifragile: Things That Gain with Disorder. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 212.
• Jacobin Magazine has published pieces about how Jane Jacob’s insights and language have been coopted by market forces. See “Liberalism and Gentrification” and “The People’s Playground.”
• I kept thinking about a big issue Jacobs kepts skirting about: race.  It’s really impossible for me to look at urban patterns without thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” Decades of redlining and the racial components of who gets mortgages is a big factor in our social geography (see also TNC’s Atlantic colleague Alexis C. Madrigal’s “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood” and ponder why charming Collingswood is 82 percent white while adjoining Camden is only 18 percent).
• Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez. A graphic novel of Robert Moses (no way!). “How New York Became New York” is an review of the novel.

Update: And also, from Genevieve’s list:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams, for its absurdist humor around the bureaucracies of planning
• Green Metropolis. David Owen,
• “What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse,” an article by Adam Mann in Wired on the phenomenon of induced demand.
• Vision Zero Initiative
• The Pine Barrens. John McPhee, the classic which I brought up.
• The Power Broker. Robert Caro.
• The Ecology of Commerce. Paul Hawken
• Organizing in the South Bronx. Jim Rooney
• Re: race: Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red and When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson.
• Re: bicycles: Urban Bikers’ Tricks & Tips. Dave Glowacz

Excuse me for the next six months while I read. 🙂

This week the New York Times Opinionator blog argues a Quaker connection in the geography of “Red” and “Blue” states–those leaning Republican and Democratic in general elections. The second half of Steven Pinker’s “Why Are States So Red and Blue?” leans on David Hackett Fischer’s awesome 1989 book Albion’s Seed. Subtitled “Four British Folkways in America” it’s a kind of secret decoder ring for American culture and politics.

Fischer argued that there were four very different settlements in the English colonies in the Americas and that each put a definitive and lasting stamp on the populations that followed. I think he’s a bit over-deterministic but it’s still great fun and the thesis does explain a lot. For example, the Scot-Irish lived in lawless region along the English-Scottish border, where people had to defend themselves; when they crossed the ocean they quickly went inland and their cultural descendants like law and order, guns and a judgmental God. Quakers from the British midlands were another one of the four groups, cooperative and peace-loving, the natural precursors to Blue states.

Now step back a bit and you realize this is incredibly over-simplistic. Many Friends in the Delaware Valley and beyond have historically been Republican, and many continue as such (though they keep quiet among politically-liberal East Coast Friends). And the current Democratic president personally approves U.S. assassination lists.

You will be forgiven if you’ve clicked to Pinker’s blog post and can’t find Quakers. For some bizarre reason, he’s stripped religion from Fischer’s argument. Why? Political correctness? Simplicity of argument. Friends are summed up with the phrase “the North was largely settled by English farmers.” Strange.

But despite these caveats, Fischer is fascinating and Pinker’s extrapolation to today’s political map is well worth a read, even if our contribution to the distribution of the American map goes un-cited.

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