The old woman knitted her brows.

She sat there in a sort of hand knitted jumper.

The US Constitution knitted together the thirteen original colonies, and its Tenth Amendment reserves to the states all powers not expressly delegated to the federal government. Even today, tensions over further centralization (e.g., to supranational authority, as in Europe) and devolution (e.g., for Scotland, Québec, or Kurdistan) are intense.

Neo Confucianism provided the basic ideology for China s admiring neighbors Japan, Korea, and Vietnam until the advent of the West. Its tenets were highly appropriate to the settled, sophisticated agrarian civilizations of pre nineteenth century East Asia, for they knitted together society and polity in a manner calculated to promote stability and harmony.