Word: feudality
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...whom Thomas Sowell quotes in the concluding chapter of Ethnic America. Yet, as Sowell points out, the United States is heir to many different pasts. Reaching as far back as the walled-in ghettoes of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages and as far away as the countryside of feudal Japan, the history of ethnic America unfolds not only on the American landscape, but on all the continents of the world. Scotch-Irish pioneers settled the mountainous regions of Appalachia, while freed Black slaves migrated to the cities of the Northeast. Turn-of-the-century immigrants turned New York into...
...traditional Celtic hostility to education and literacy is paralleled among the peasants of southern Italy, Sowell says. Oppression by feudal martinets engendered attitudes that resisted any conception of upward mobility. Education, as promulgated by either state or church, was an invasion of the sanctity of the family, the only institution southern Italians found they could depend upon in times of adversity. Sowell argues that the steamships bringing Italians to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century transported this faithlessness with them. It was the "bad" son or daughter who was selfish enough to desire college education...
...ideas are similarly impossible to prove. There lies Sowell's problem. Imploring readers to set aside prejudice, to look honestly at causes and effects, makes little sense when those "causes" must travel thousands of miles with the immigrants that populated America. The Italian suspicion of education and the feudal Japanese work ethic may have survived both their ocean voyages and their integration into the larger American society...
Others are disgruntled leftists, while still others are perennially recalcitrant tribal chiefs nostalgic for the bad old days of the feudal monarchy that was overthrown...
...contemporary writers can match Clavell's sense of place, a talent that evoked feudal Japan in Shogun. Here he recalls the febrile life of the Crown Colony in August 1963. If the countless ayeeyahs make the book occasionally sound like Terry and the Pirates, there is much to ayeeyah about: murder, kidnaping, smuggling, a fire on a floating restaurant, a typhoon and a disastrous mudslide that helps sort out the convoluted plot...