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David Hackett Fischer

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America Paperback – January 1, 1991

by David Hackett Fischer (Author)

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Book 1 of 2: America: a cultural history

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ISBN-10 : 0195069056
ISBN-13 : 978-0195069051
Item Weight : 3 pounds
Publisher : Oxford University Press; Text is Free of Markings edition (January 1, 1991)
ASIN : B002A7FKTW
Language: : English

Best Sellers Rank: #3,477,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,200 in U.S. Colonial Period History
- #9,766 in Folklore & Mythology Studies
- #10,283 in Ethnic Demographic Studies

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389 ratings

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capucine

I particularly liked the breakdown of each group into their 'folkways' - ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2016

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I purchased this book after Malcolm Gladwell referenced it in "Outliers". This book is dauntingly large in format, but actually straightforward to read and deeply engrossing. It covers four separate migrations from the British Isles to America, hence the size. I particularly liked the breakdown of each group into their 'folkways' - that is, attitudes about sex, child rearing, education etc. It's not academically dense writing, easy to absorb and ended up being very touching to me seeing how folkway characteristics from hundreds of years ago in England are still perpetuated in my family today.

52 people found this helpful

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Lynne B. Tagawa

a gold mine of information

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2018

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This sizable book is invaluable to all serious students of American history. It's not written in narrative fashion as a more popular treatment would be, but in sections, so that a reader can flip easily to the pertinent place.

The author covers four basic people groups that left the British Isles for the New World: the people who colonized New England, those who settled the middle colonies (including Quakers), the class-conscious settlers of the southern tidewater, and the Scots-Irish, who came over in a huge wave after 1700.

It's not a treatment of events but rather culture. How many kids did the average family have in New England? What was a Scots-Irish marriage like? There are lots of statistics that might be boring to the casual reader but serve as a gold mine for someone writing a paper or doing background research for a historical project or novel.

28 people found this helpful

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Jane Hall

important!!!

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2018

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Albion's Seed is a beautifully written history of America. It explains regional differences and how difficult these differences are to overcome. Reading about the original settlers of this country helped me understand how and why cultures clash to this day and how cultural folkways are imbedded in our institutions. Only when we understand history can we begin to stop repeating it. I recommend this book to everyone. It is a must read.

11 people found this helpful

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JoAnna H.

Anyone into genealogy with ancestors from the British Isles will love this book.

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2019

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This is a very informative book with information from the 17th and 18th century immigration from the British Isles. it has sections about the Puritans, Quakers, Indentured servants, and immigration to the "back country." The latter refers to the Scots-Irish, Scottish, Irish who were more down home country folk. You can treat this as a reference book or just read the sections that pertain to your ancestors or read the whole thing in whatever order you choose. Being in four parts, I started with the back country first.

6 people found this helpful

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T. Graczewski

Re-discovering modern America

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2012

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David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America" is a stunning academic achievement. Each of the four folkways described by the author are book length and authoritative. It is remarkable to read just how unique each of these "great migrations" were and how they have left an indelible cultural imprint on those geographic areas long after the original inhabitants faded into oblivion (when's the last time you've seen a Puritan in Boston or a Quaker in Philadelphia?). Fischer explores each migration in great detail, comparing and contrasting a variety of "ways" that defined their cultures: wealth, elites, sex, sports, architecture, religion, speech, family, aging, death, child-rearing, naming conventions, food, work, supernatural beliefs, philosophy and so on.

The author begins with the Puritans, the vast majority of whom emigrated from the East Anglia region of England, who settled New England from 1629 to 1641. The special features of the Puritan experience, according to Fischer, included a relatively salubrious climate; the immigrants tended to be older and middle class (few poor or aristocrats); wealth distribution remained even (top 10% only owned 20% of property); age was revered over material possessions or social status; literacy and education were highly prized; while "order" and "liberty" were an obsession, although not how we would think of those terms in a modern sense (mostly collective and community restraints on conduct ensuring the ability to live a truly Puritan lifestyle, a sort of fundamentalist Christian society that Al Qaeda would likely approve of).

The cavaliers who settled Virginia in the second great migration from 1642 to 1675 were quite distinct from the Puritans - and in many ways, Fischer writes. The author presents Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, who served for 35-years, as the embodiment of the cavalier gentleman, just as Puritan leader John Winthrop represented the Puritan culture of New England. What made the Virginia cavaliers unique were that they tended to come from southern England; most were younger sons (and thus disinherited because of primogeniture) of wealthy families who hailed from a hierarchical society of "deep and pervasive inequalities"; nearly three-quarters of the immigrants were servants from the lower class while the top 10% owned 75% of the region's productive assets; they were overwhelmingly Anglican in their religion and passionately so; most lived in rural and widely distributed communities unlike the compact New England Puritan town; families were large, extended and intermingled unlike the Puritan nuclear family; it was a society that honored rank and wealth and seniority, not simply age; there was a cultural focus on "hegemonic liberty" or "dominion over oneself", an ethos that was deeply embedded in the Tidewater and produced sterling examples over the centuries, from George Washington to Robert E. Lee to George Marshall. In one of the author's many keen insights, he writes that "Slavery did not create the culture of Tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery."

If the Puritans had John Winthrop and the cavaliers William Berkeley, the Quakers, representing the third great migration, who settled the mid-Atlantic region from 1675 to 1725, had William Penn as the embodiment of their migration and culture. The Quakers were generally of humble origin, hailing from the midlands of northern England, many of whom had suffered serious persecution for their beliefs and thus saw the New World in religious terms similar to the Puritans but unlike the cavaliers. The Quaker sense of family extended exclusively to all co-religionists ("Friends"), not just a nuclear or extended family; they enjoyed the closest equality between the sexes of any migration and were much more indulgent toward their children; the aged were not venerated (the Puritans) and neither were patriarchs (the cavaliers), but rather were treated as community mentors, but only if "deserving"; death was welcomed as a fulfillment of life, not something to be feared as by the Puritans and cavaliers; both black magic and higher learning were generally eschewed in Quaker society; sports were almost universally condemned, whereas the Puritans loved their ball games and the cavaliers their horse races; Quakers sought to "redeem" time, rather than "improving" it (Puritan) or "killing" it (cavalier); wealth distribution was even like the Puritans (top 10% owned 25% of productive assets) while social rank and hierarchy were abhorred; if the cavaliers adhered to "hegemonic liberty," Quakers remained faithful to the "inner light," a belief that everyone, man or woman, were capable of embracing Jesus' love and grace.

Unlike the other three great cultural migrations, the backcountry migration flowing from Scotland and Ireland (1717 to 1775) were not looking for religious freedom, although they mostly shared the Presbyterian faith. They were the first American migration focused mainly on finding a better, more prosperous life in the New World. The main theme of this culture, according to Fischer, is violence, which was a product of the British borderlands from whence they came. The author uses Andrew Jackson as the archetype for this culture: proud, principled, hardworking, and physically aggressive. These migrants, who settled the early mid-west, were overwhelmingly poor, but had their own version of the "elite," where local leaders depended on charisma, loyalty, influence, and all too often physical force. Fischer stresses the importance of the warrior culture and the centrality of violence in the backcountry folkway. His section on backcountry "sport ways" is especially fascinating. Wrestling and fistfights, for example, were main events, including "rough & tumble" brawls that allowed biting and eye-gouging. The backcountry was among the most unequal in terms of wealth distribution (top 10% held from 40-80% of productive assets), yet there was a social system that called for the equality of esteem, no matter one's wealth, a need to be recognized as an equal, which may help explain the prevailing system of lex talionis (rule of retribution). This was the culture, after all, that produced the Hatfields and the McCoys.

There are several themes that emerged from this weighty tome: America has been fundamentally shaped by the voluntary nature of the great migrations that populated her regions (unlike the compulsory and centralized migrations engineered for New France and New Spain); slavery developed very slowly in America and was generated by the unique transplanted cultures that grew there, not the other way around; the regional differences in the United States are often more dramatic than between countries in Europe (e.g. the wealth disparity between New England the South in the late 1800s was similar to the difference between Germany and Russia in the same time period); the four folkways had some things in common, but generally speaking they were all antagonistic to one another, which was all too evident from the American Revolution to the present day; these regional differences have often led to omnibus strategies for electing presidents, an attempt to find a candidate who appeals to at least two of the traditional folkways, such as Harrison (1840), Taylor (1848), Pierce (1852), Eisenhower (1952) and Bush (1988).

All told, this book is an eye-opening education. It runs nearly 1,000 pages in length and can be daunting at times; however, the insights and erudition Fischer delivers are worth the effort.

66 people found this helpful

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Dan Starr

MP3 version is abridged/truncated

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2018

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PSA - the review is for the MP3 version only. Despite the artwork on the disc/case saying it is unabridged, it is only six hours. That should have told me something since the Audible version is ~29 hours. Also, the MP3 disc starts abruptly by saying, "Chapter Four..." so you'll know something's amiss right away.

I thought it might only be my copy, so I asked for a return from Amazon. The second copy they send (free of charge), was exactly the same.

Despite this, I have so far found this version listenable, and after getting over the jarring beginning, I'm still enjoying it.

6 people found this helpful

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Mike Daplyn

Excellent, but use caution

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2019

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This is an excellent book, informed by a wide knowledge and love of the folkways of both the Eastern USA and its cultural ancestors in the British Isles. Its particular virtue is that it dispels the popular myth, prevalent in other former British colonies (notably Australia) as well as the US, that somehow the migrants underwent some sort of sea-change in mid-ocean, landing as fully fledged cultural citizens of whatever brave new continent they had arrived in. How many allegedly historical documentaries, let alone Hollywood fictions, we have seen that show the disembarking colonists with speech, dress and attitudes that in reality took decades if not centuries to evolve in response to the conditions of their new homes.

Nevertheless, some of Fischer’s statements must be treated with caution, especially regarding the British roots of American folkways, for to be honest he doesn’t know Britain quite as well as he imagines. Some examples, which probably are self-evident to most of my fellow Brits, but perhaps less so to the Transatlantic persuasion:

• He lays much stress on a supposed Scandinavian influence on the development of Quakerism in Northern England. BUT: the Quakers were only ever a minority even in Northern England, so any Scandinavian influence must have influenced just as much non-Quakers, including many of his ‘Borderers’ to whom he ascribes totally different folkways; also, Scandinavian influence was just as strong, maybe more so, well outside the alleged Northern heartlands of Quakerism. Scandinavian influence in England centred on the East Midlands, the land of the ‘Five Boroughs’, and extended well into East Anglia, where he locates the Puritan cultural tradition quite different from that of the Quakers.

• He consistently conflates the Welsh (and Cornish) language with the Gaelic language of Ireland and Highland Scotland. As an Englishman of part-Welsh descent, now domiciled in a Gaelic-speaking region of Scotland, I’m not sure which party would view this proposition with greater scorn. Welsh and Gaelic are of course kindred languages of the Celtic family, and still have some very close similarities (a privy is a ty bach in Welsh and a tigh beag in Gaelic) but they had been going their separate ways for thousands of years before any of their speakers crossed the Atlantic.

• He groups the Northern counties of England – Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire – into a ‘North Midlands’ which would never be recognised by a native of any of them. The Midlands in England stop at Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (if not sooner) and beyond that it’s The North. The Northerners feud rancorously with each other, but they would unite to spit (or worse) on any suggestion they were Midlanders.

• He misunderstands the relationship of the Cameronians (both the sect and the regiment) to the Government, leading to the assertion that ‘After 1689, the authorities conceded defeat ...’. Before1688 the Government was that of the Catholic-leaning Stewart Kings Charles II and James II, both agents of the Whore of Babylon in Cameronian eyes; consequently the Cameronians were the armed wing in Scotland of the movement to oust James in favour of William of Orange. Post-1688 William was the Government, they were on his side and ideologically the natural candidates to be enrolled en masse against the Jacobite counter-attack. Any resemblance to the Middle Eastern sectarian militias we so know and love is of course purely coincidental.

13 people found this helpful

hbw

Becoming American

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2008

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In this endlessly fascinating and achingly beautiful book, David Hacket Fisher follows the fortunes of four groups of early migrants on their physical, cultural and spiritual journeys from the British Isles to what became the United States.

For the Puritans and Quakers who settled in Massachusetts and Delaware, respectively, the aim was nothing less than a rejection of 17th century England to build new kinds of society based on radically different values. In contrast, the cavaliers who headed to Virginia consciously set out to recreate the aristocratic land-owning society that was beginning to be undermined in their native Southern England.

The North British (landless Scots, Northern Irish and Cumbrian rednecks from the borders of the Irish Sea), having no real plan, headed as far from the law as possible and carried on feuding.

Fisher brings these various groups and their very different worlds vividly to life by examining different facets of what he calls "folkways" - everything from how they raised their children to the enormous variations in the roles and status of women. More importantly, he argues that these four cultures were crucial to the creation and development of the United States as well as many of the social structures and attitudes that we think of as distinctively American.

Despite its size (800+pages) and scope, this is an eminently readable book. Fischer wears his scholarship lightly and brings his tale to life with well chosen anecdotes. The publishers should be congratulated on the paperback edition - it's printed on good quality paper in clear good-sized type and contains fine black and white illustrations that complement the text.

Above all, this book "rings true". It clearly resonates with American readers. The rest of us will find both a fascinating work of history and a key to understanding the cultural landscape of the modern United States.

24 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Excellent product, quick service, good price!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2015

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Excellent product, quick service, good price!

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David F.Gladwin

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2014

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Excellant book, sent very quickly and really well packed. Thanks

One person found this helpful

Cap'n Bob

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2015

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A Classic

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