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Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history) (VOLUME I) 1st Edition
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While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
- ISBN-109780195069051
- ISBN-13978-0195069051
- Edition1st
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateMarch 14, 1989
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions9.2 x 1.9 x 6.1 inches
- Print length984 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Professor Fischer's careful research and analysis opens a much needed discussion of cultural character and origins in North America. The variety and complexity of historical sources will inform the work of other cultural historians and analysts."Nadesan Permaul, UC Berkeley
"This is history at a lively pace, peppered with curious details about the origins of families. The author makes a convincing case."Dolores and Roger Flaherty, Chicago Sun-Times
"A pleasure to read, for it is written with Fischer's characteristic perspicuity. Moreover, the numerous drawings by Jennifer Brody and maps by Andrew Mudryk are a visual treat."Raymond A. Mohl, Review Essay
"The kind of book one can open to almost any page and immediately become engrossed readers will enjoy and benefit from this book. We eagerly await volume two."Neil R. Stout, Vermont History
"Holds up to readers a mirror in which they can discover in themselves and in their own world the persistence of their heritage. An engrossing work that will whet the appetite for more."The National Genealogical Society Quarterly
"Ingenious and provocative. Raises matters of cardinal interest."The Times Literary Supplement
"A splendid work of historical scholarship based on an original conception of cultural history which I find extremely usable. Eminently readable."Omer Hadziselimovic, Earlham College [see review card for accents on last name]
"[A] sprightly analysis. This is history at a lively pace, peppered with curious details about the origins of familiar words and practices. The author makes a convincing case for his claim that `in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion's seed."Chicago Sun-Times
"One of the most interesting, important, and ambitious books about American cultural and social origins ever written. A richly rewarding book, and one of great significance. It blends the best of new and old scholarship in lucid language designed to attract laymen and students alike. Very simply, Albion's Seed is a splendid achievement."Michael Kammen, New York Newsday
"David Hackett Fischer's book could not be much bigger or more ambitious. It is the first in a series of volumes that he hopes will eventually constitute a cultural history of the United States. This book starts his series with a banga big bang remarkable. A revisionist blockbuster."Gordon Wood, The New Republic
"Beautifully produced, this work should popularize the discoveries of a generation of scholars in the new social history. Anyone interested in these four cultures of the Anglo-American colonists will find here population data, family life, community mores, and achetypical individuals, portrayed in a clear and often lively text, thoughtfully analyzed illustrations, and wonderful maps."Stephen Saunders Webb, Washington Post Book World
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- ASIN : 0195069056
- Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (March 14, 1989)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 984 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780195069051
- ISBN-13 : 978-0195069051
- Item Weight : 3.03 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.2 x 1.9 x 6.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #71,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #123 in Folklore & Mythology Studies
- #185 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- #2,268 in Classic Literature & Fiction
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About the author

David Hackett Fischer is University Professor and Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. The recipient of many prizes and awards for his teaching and writing, he is the author of numerous books, including Washington's Crossing, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history.
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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.
1) Is fascinating in all that it teaches us about 17th and 18th century Anglo-American "popular culture", i.e. how people thought and led their spiritual, social and material lives, as well as the roots of this culture in the Middle Ages.
2) Answered all of my basic questions on the continuity between America and its English past.
3) Throws a very interesting light on American history and culture up to this day.
The argument developed in "Albion's seed" is that American culture is based on four strands of English regional cultures that pursued a life of their own once they found a home across the Atlantic.
It is also that their interactions explain most major events of US history since the revolution. These cultures are still very much alive in the United States, according to David Hackett Fischer, although they did not remain static and were nourished by the subsequent waves of migration from Europe and elsewhere.
The coexistence of those four cultures explains the main regional differences in the US including voting patterns in presidential elections.
The developments from 1776 to 1989 (publication date of "Albion's seed") are the subject of the last 100 pages of this huge book. But the first 800 are devoted to present one by one, these very important " four British folkways" in all their aspects, with an immense wealth of detail.
The main themes developed by the author are as follows:
a) First of all the four migrations were regional both in their origin and destinations:
1) East Anglia to Massachusetts
2) Southwest England to Virginia
3) The English North Midlands to Pennsylvania
4) The English-Scottish border area to the Appalachia and the Southern Backcountry
b) The movements happened at different times. The first two occurred before 1688 and the last two after that date, up to the 1770's. They were each the product of periods of economic, political or religious troubles in England that convinced their "victims" to leave the Mother Country in large numbers and seek a better life elsewhere.
c) Their religion and social origins were also very distinct.
A propertied Puritan middle class from East Anglia settled in Massachusetts to escape the poor and the Nobility. Anglican second sons of the Gentry went from Southwest England to Virginia and recreated large estates to be worked by a proletarian underclass (who, because of the climate, they imported mostly from Africa). Northern Quaker Artisans and Shopkeepers tried to create an egalitarian utopia in Pennsylvania and Delaware. The poor border farmers, who moved to the Backcountry, professed an evangelical religion and were simply looking to escape starvation.
d) As a consequence of a, b and c, these people carried with them whole sets of very distinct social values that reflected their origins. They spoke different dialects of English and had their own views on all aspects of life, i.e. local political institutions, ideals of liberty, hierarchy, work, marriage, gender relations, child naming and raising, ways to structure and exploit the land, build houses, cook, clothe, practice sports, etc.
David Hackett Fischer has managed to find compelling historical evidence that all these values were all very characteristic of immigrants' regions of origins.
And today, now that, according to US census statistics, less than 20% of Americans have any English ancestry at all, it is precisely those social values that are the more lasting legacy of the first migrants to America. They make Americans in a very real sense "children" of 17th and 18th century England.
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There should be more works like this for eg I would expect Native Americans to have their own stories of how different their tribes are from one another.
It's also interesting because it helps to understand how long term interaction with a particular geography and set of social circumstances can set up what may become entrenched patterns. It reminds me that it is easier to retain bad rather than good patterns of behaviour. I particularly liked that the author identifies the four groups differing characteristics according to food, sex, architecture, colours, sex, politics and liberty. On Local Polity and liberty he ascribes:
Town Meeting and Ordered Liberty to the Puritans of Massachusetts
Parish & Court and Hegemonic Liberty to the distressed Cavaliers of Virginia
Commission and Reciprocal Liberty to the Pilgrims of Pennsylvania, and
Court and Natural Liberty to the Border Reivers of the Appalachian Mountains.
It left me contemplating whether the Republican descendants of those distressed cavaliers and border reivers are perhaps truer to their (not so idealistic) roots than the descendants of New England are to their ideals, and it left me hoping that the local press and town meetings of New England will long prosper.
Fisher outlines all the different customs and folkways, these people practiced in their new settlements. They also established the various institutions of government, laws, and religion, in their regions. These institutions, enabled many of the cultural traditions, to be passed down through the centuries.
The reader will find many of the traditional folkways, are still practiced in the modern USA. Fischer enables the reader to understand, where all these differences orginated from.
This was a fasinating history book. I hope this approach to history, is taken up by other writers. In particular, I would to love to read about, the different cultural memes within Canada. This book is highly recommended.







