Best-of one-liners: [...] the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream [Among Virginians] Freedom, like wealth, was properly distri

Best-of one-liners: [...] the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream [Among Virginians] Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank The Quakers basically tolerated themselves out of existence. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence. If America is best explained as a Puritan-Quaker culture locked in a death-match with a Cavalier-Borderer culture, with all of the appeals to freedom and equality and order and justice being just so many epiphenomena – well, I’m not sure what to do with that information.