Michael Powell wrote in today's NYTimes Week in Review on the mobility and unrootedness of American life. The usual references, keyed off Obama's life. Allow me to be a bit contrarian--it's easy to overemphasize how much Americans move. That's my impression from researching my genealogy. There are lots of people who stay in the same place, the same area, for most of their lives. There are still descendants of Captain John Rippey and Mary Orson living in the York, PA area, some 250 years later. And my cousin has mentioned a resident of Ipswich, MA who traces his ancestry back to the town's founding, some 360 years ago.
None of this means we Americans don't have a (physically) mobile society compared to others. (After all, some Arabs trace their ancestry back to the Prophet.) But mobility is not something everyone experiences.
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