This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.
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.

But what's here is marvelous. Fischer traces the distinctive folkways and religious influence of the four great waves of English emigration to the American colonies, and shows how they combined to make modern USAmerica.

I have 19th century immigrant roots, and have never lived in the South or New England. I can't therefore confirm or dispute what Fischer and the various reviewers say about the distinctive regional U.S. differences that persist there today, and how they go back to the original English immigrants. But as a modern USAmerican from California, I can see the various strands that make up our general culture in each of the four founding regions.

This is a long book, perhaps a bit too long, but I recommend it highly, and since discovering it I automatically read any book Fischer produces. I have yet to read a bad one by him. Now let's have further volumes in the series!

37 of 37 found the following review helpful:


A "must" reference for any serious historiographer!  Jan 04, 2000 By Sally Burnell
"Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer explains in clear understandable language how four waves of English migration to these shores in the 17th century forever impacted on who and what we would become as Americans. The "folkways" that they brought with them have, to this day, remained, and traveling through what were once the original 13 colonies, one can still see and hear what our original English forebears brought with them, if you look and listen close enough. In particular, one of the more revealing things about the book is the explanation of the deeper causes of our American Civil War, which we are always taught in history classes was rooted in slavery. Fischer goes beyond the obvious to point out a basic conflict of "folkways" that had begun back on English soil with the English Civil War between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, who on American soil would become the Southerners and the Yankees. This deeper cause explains why even today echoes of the Civil War remain in the political differences between North and South. This book is a very important reference for anyone interested in any variety of topics, from genealogy to linguistics to history to architecture to urban planning and so much more. Fischer explains how each of these cultures had unique patterns of town planning, marriage, food, death, birth, speech, religion, education and more. Jam packed full of important information, this book belongs in the library of anyone who has an interest in who we are and why we Americans are such a pluralistic nation. I cannot recommend this book enough, and eagerly await other books in this series on the cultural history of America. This book explained so much to me about my own family and I saw a microcosm of the age old North-South conflict in my own maternal grandparents. My grandfather was of old Cavalier stock and was born and raised in the Deep South. My grandmother was of New England Irish stock that had married into old Yankee blood. They bickered about everything imaginable, and I often wondered why their frequent disagreements. However, when grandfather died, I found out that in spite of it all, grandmother truly loved him, and that it was just her New England ways that caused the constant clashes with her Southern Cavalier husband. I found myself at times laughing out loud as I recognised speech patterns in my own family that have been passed down to me, and other assorted echoes of folkways from my family's past as well were recognisable in Fischer's book. I came to know myself better through a better understanding of who my family is, where they came from and why they acted the way they did. So from a genealogist's standpoint, this book is also of tremedous value. VERY RECOMMENDED! FIVE STARS!

21 of 21 found the following review helpful:


Outstanding Scholarship  Jul 22, 2008 By mid-20s male
How lucky I feel to have come across and finished one of those rare books that not only provides critical historical information, but also indelibly transforms the way I view the world.

The massive tome is about four discrete immigrant movements from Britain to the U.S. and their critical influence on modern regional cultures here. The migrations covered in the book start around 1630 with the East Anglian Puritans, and conclude with Ulster Scots-Irish and Anglo-Scots whose journey from impoverished regions of Britain into the backwoods areas of the Appalachians ended around 1775. His scholarship on the regional British cultures that defined the nucleus of each of the migrations is extremely impressive, and it gives him loads of ways to compare the original culture with its transplanted descendant in America. Incidentally, I never knew much about the history or geography of Britain up until I read this book, but after finishing it I found myself fascinated by just how much regional variation there was and was inspired to learn more.

One conclusion well-developed throughout Fischer's opus is that ethnic culture can remain strikingly uniform even after being transplanted to an entirely new geography and passing through many generations there (Kurds in Germany or Jews in ancient Babylon come to mind). He also argues that it was the values of the elites (mercantile and industrious in New England, humble and humanistic in New Jersey and east Pennsylvania, aristocratic and labor-averse in Virginia) that led to differences in the development of the economy.

Take the example of slavery, which was fundamental to antebellum southern states but less popular in the north. Fischer contends that slave ownership in southern colonies was more extensive due to the political hegemony of country squires (aka Cavaliers) originally from the Wessex region in SW England, particularly in the colony of Virgina. These privileged colonials believed that only landholding was an acceptable source of income for their sort, while physical labor and mercantilism were seen as contemptible, suitable only for those of low station. So while fertile lands farther north were being worked in small plots by yeoman farmer types with few or no slaves, the colony of Virginia became dominated by large plantations and manor houses that mirrored Saxon aristocracy. But since the region was semi-tropical and malarial, they chose African slaves over the white servants/serfs that were so essential to the manors of their ancestors. In other words, an imported British culture created the plantation system, not Virginian geography.

The final portion of the book deals with the pervasiveness of these original cultures throughout our national history. Fischer considers them as regionally dominant even now, despite the arrival of throngs of non-British immigrants over the centuries. Just like English has maintained itself as our national language even though less than 20% of our nation is of British descent, the prejudices of British immigrants 200-300 years ago still persist in a much more ethnically varied peoplescape.

There's much to learn AND to enjoy. Despite its 900+ pages Fischer is a lucid and focused writer, and he sprinkles the dry facts and figures with compelling anecdotes. This is essentially a polemical work, and he does jam a few squarish pegs into round holes (there are NYC Jewish gun-nuts, New Jersey Italian mobsters, and Alabama Scots-Irish peaceniks out there), but the overall evidence is so compelling that I feel this should be a standard text in high school American History courses. The belief structures of the four migrations (two really, since the Virginian/backcountry worldviews loosely align, as does that of the Puritans with the Quakers) are organized by Fischer around four distinct definitions of "freedom". Regional political conflicts are made understandable once the reader grasps these four separate outlooks.

The most provocative part of the book, in my opinion, is Fischer's scholarship and speculation about the basis of Borderer culture. "Borderers" came from southern Scotland and northern England and primarily settled and dominated the hillier, more forested regions in the Appalachians. They are often called Scots-Irish, but Fischer shows that most spoke English rather than Gaelic and had no immediate Irish blood or background. These were the people who even at that time might be called "crackers" or "rednecks" (terms that came from Britain). Centuries of cross-border warfare, raiding, and exploitative absentee lords left them with little belief in the ability of governments to promote justice and peace, and a sense that one must always be ready to defend oneself with violence. These values prepared them for the dangers of settling first the Appalachian frontier and then the Wild West, but left their descendants with a predilection toward violent conflict, as well as valuing physical prowess and robust sexuality over education and economic prosperity. We don't have any Hatfield-McCoy clan feuds in this day and age, as far as I know, but many of the fundamental belief structures of the ancient Borderers still exist through large portions of country. To my mind they bedevil us, even as they define our "average Joe" better than any other culture. People like Sen. Jim Webb and author Joe Bageant exemplify both the value and pitfalls of Borderer beliefs; they exemplify mental talent and fierce will but also carry the gloomy, suspicious, violence-prone outlook of their forebears.

Not only that, but Fischer's throw-aside supposition that long-term political instability tends to promote Borderer-style worldviews does a lot to help people from more cooperative areas understand aggressive clannish peoples, such as Somalis, Albanians, Tuaregs, and the Kurds of SE Turkey.

There's a large mental gap between someone raised in a home that trusts in guns over government and someone raised in a home with a focus on kindness, cooperation, and non-violent conflict resolution. The former sees the latter as childish and naive, while the latter sees the former as needlessly aggressive and paranoid. Both may be "correct" about the other, especially within the conditions of their region, but for any human it is difficult to imagine the effect of growing up in a culture with such fundamentally different assumptions. It's much easier to simply label one another as "wrong".

So I see this book as a Rosetta Stone, an incomplete primer into how to speak another person's internal language when that person has a different understanding of the nature of "freedom" in society as compared to you. It's straight-up BRILLIANT.

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