From one of America's preeminent historians comes a magisterial study of the development of open societies focusing on the United States and New Zealand David Hackett Fischer has produced a highly readable comparative history of the United States and New Zealand as open societies ... His excellent introduction to the relative weighting of these key values in New Zealand and the United States should encourage scholars to embark on broader studies of why shared commitments to fairness and freedom have resulted in different balances in the histories of open societies.