Albion's Seed

After reading David Hackett’s book, I cannot think of American society in the same way again. The United States is touted as the great melting pot, but we all know that cultural nuggets may refuse to mix thoroughly with the rest. What I learned from this book is that even within white Angle-America, behavior patterns that differentiated Englishmen hundreds of years ago persist in America today. This book is not about red states and blue states, but it is impossible to read it and not see the connections.

Hackett traces the colonial immigration of four populations who settled the colonies–New… show more.

In recent years we have often heard it said that the United States is, for the first time in history, a diverse society.

David Hackett Fischer’s classic Albion’s Seed illustrates how not only the United States but the British seaboard colonies had enormous cultural diversity, based on the different regional origins in the British Isles of the bulk of their settlers.

The Founders knew this already: John Adams of Massachusetts nominated George Washington of Virginia to be commander of the Continental Army, because he understood that the Revolution needed support beyond New England, and Washington as commander soon learned that… show more.

Albion’s Seed charts how four different British groups migrated to North America and brought their cultures with them.

It reveals that a great many things that we think of as uniquely American—from work ethic, to language, to education, to lifestyle, to food—instead arrived alongside the Puritans to New England, the Quakers to Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers to Virginia, and the borderland settlers to the backwoods. Fischer’s cumulative power will make you fully question what makes Americans, and their nation, unique.

This masterpiece is the equivalent of an MRI scan of America’s cultural history. Its 900 pages are packed with scintillating insight into patterns of behaviour and belief underpinning the lives of ordinary Americans. Fischer uncovers ways of thinking and acting that traveled with migrants from the British Isles: Puritans from East Anglia, Cavaliers from the South of England, Quakers from the North Midlands, and English/Scottish Borderers. The author explores and explains American ideas of liberty, time, property, family, ways of working, law and order, and so much more.