Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42976 in Books
• Published on: 1989-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 972 pages

From Library Journal
This cultural history explains the European settlement of the United States as voluntary migrations from four English cultural centers. Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American backcountry. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements. The final chapter shows the significance of these regional cultures for American history up to the present. Insightful, fresh, interesting, and well-written, this synthesis of traditional and more current historical scholarship provides a model for interpretations of the American character. Subsequent volumes of this promised multivolume work will be eagerly awaited. Highly recommended for the general reader and the scholar.
- David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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."--IThe 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 bang--a 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

About the Author

David Hackett Fischer is Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. He is the author of numerous books, including Paul Revere's Ride and Growing Old in America.

Customer Reviews

More For Reference Than Reading
Yawn. I just finished reading David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed", and boy are my arms tired. You just try holding a 1,000-page paperback up in your bed without cracking a finger or the book's spine.

Was it worth it? Well, it was Fischer, one of my favorite authors, on the subject of American history, at which he is the best. The subject is the four cultures that made up the fabric of American society before the Revolution, and Fischer lays out his case in a clear, compelling way.

1. The Puritans - Misrepresented somewhat by modern historians but stern killjoys just the same, they settled the New England region and argued over such matters as whether it was moral to rescue a man trapped in a well on the Sabbath.

2. The Cavaliers - Wannabe aristocrats who congregated along the southern coast. Think "Gone With The Wind" without so much backtalk from the slaves. "...especially strong in Virginia, where it was reinforced by the values of an English culture that tended to be profoundly conservative in every sense - elitist, hierarchical, and strenuously hostile to social change."

3. The Quakers - Moral, high-toned, and as dry as those oats which bear their name. Believed in the inner light that led them to God, and hold up best to modern eyes despite a strenuous adversity to sex that led to the lowest birthrates and best furniture in the Americas. Founded Pennsylvania.

4. Backcountry "crackers" - See "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel". Hard drinkers, borderline rapists, and Andrew Jackson. Cavaliers only tormented geese for laughs. The Crackers did the same to each other: "Bloodsports have existed in many cultures, but this was one of the few that made an entertainment of blinding, maiming, and castration."

Reading "Albion's Seed" made me feel more enlightened, yes, but it was hardly invigorating in the same way as Fischer's "Washington's Crossing" or "Paul Revere's Ride." It's a different kind of book, yes. You can't expect as many active verbs reading about sociology as you would with combat. But it feels more than a touch pat and stereotyped.

More problematically, it reads awfully slow, as Fischer painstakingly revisits the same subject areas with each of the four groups in turn. Long footnotes read like narrative, while narrative sections read like footnotes. Fischer walks each culture back to its English roots, drawing upon similarities that certainly resonate but hardly seem to matter. That Puritans wore the same clothes as their East Anglican forebears doesn't seem so important considering the lack of interest Puritans took in clothes in the first place.

Most frustrating is a final section where Fischer examines the impact of these four cultural groups on every U.S. Presidential election, right up to the one the year before the book was published in 1989. Fischer makes a point of saying all but two of the first 41 presidents had roots in one of the four groups, though that's less of a surprise given the dominance of English Protestants in American society than the fact Martin Van Buren slipped through. Fischer also seems to ignore the larger evidence that his four cultures have mutated quite out of recognition. Just try finding a Puritan in Boston today.

What's solid about the book is Fischer's way with a point, his ability to move quickly between subjects with his deft erudition and writerly flair, and most especially the enthusiasm he brings to dissecting the American WASP. But after a couple hundred pages the eyes glaze over, after 500 you are re-reading pages like a punch-drunk fighter in the 15th round. Save this for the shelf, but you'll enjoy it more in smaller doses on items of immediate interest.

Outstanding Scholarship
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.

Long Read, but Well Worth It
My daughter was very impressed by Albion's Seed when she read it as part of her undergrad studies in history. Several years after her graduation, I finally got around to reading it. I love scholarly books on history. Before Albion's Seed, I'd read Karen Armstrong's A History of God and Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror. I didn't find Fischer's strength to be his writing (actually, there were several times when I became annoyed with him for his lack of footnotes, which would have especially worthwhile to explain some of the obscurities he passed over), but Fischer's strength is analysis--especially in tying the English colonists folkways to geographic behaviors and trends of today. Albion's Way is a wonderful seminal work on American culture. As long as it took me to finish this book (it was a long slog for me), it was incredibly worthwhile. Highly recommended!