Zelinsky's Cultural Regions and Modernization at Home, 1880-1930

A more powerful test of Sowell's hypothesis

In the previous dispatch, we outlined a novel strategy for testing Sowell’s cultural persistence hypothesis. Sowell argued, in effect, that the cultural expansion of New England was central to the modernization process at home in the American century. Whereas New England culture was especially conducive to socioeconomic development, he argued, Southern …