Local Attachments

by Alexander von Hoffman

"Most men have local attachment so strong," wrote the author of a Massachusetts town history published in 1847, "that it invests some spot, endeared by association, with controlling interest." In the seventy years that followed this observation, the United States was transformed from a rural society of small communities into an urban nation where most people lived in cities. Surprisingly, writes Alexander von Hoffman, this transformation did not destroy "local attachments" and create an impersonal, atomized society. Instead, these attachments flourished in the fundamental unit of urban...

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