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Have any body hear about of Albion Seed,written by David Hacket Fischer.
Albion Seed is about Folkways the way America behave, after 20years of written this book do you think this still describe the way Americans behave.
I want you people to respond
I've read the book within the past year, cover to cover. At 900 pages, it's not for the faint of heart.
The author does a superb job of documenting the transplanted cultures of the four (as he identifies them) major migrations from England to North America between 1620 and 1725. The sheer amount of information alone makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in pre-revolutionary English colonial culture in America. Be warned, however, that it does tend to run very dry.
Fischer's entire thesis is that the four cultures (or folkways) transplanted from four distinct regions in England onto the eastern seaboard of the North American continent are together the main driving factors of American history from 1725 up until the present day, and that these cultures have remained distinct and dominant within their "migration zones" (my term) in the current day United States:
New England Puritans who spread from the Northeast through the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest.
Pennsylvanian Quakers (along with German Pietists) who spread from the Delaware Valley through the Lower Midwest and the Great Plains.
Chesapeake Bay Cavaliers (and their indentured servants and slaves) who spread through the American South and down to Texas.
Borderers (aka the Scots-Irish) who spread through Appalachia (both North and South) and through the upper Southern states.
According to Fischer, these four regional cultures explain everything about the shape of American History from the Revolutionary War (which he divides into four separate efforts - one for each folkway) through the current presidential elections.
In my opinion, Fischer's thesis fails in several regards.
He uses as one of his main metrics the Presidential Elections from 1789 to 1989 (the year the book was published) to support his thesis, but counts the popular vote by state, not by county or by electoral district. This hides the urban/rural divide that is quite acutely visible in the the Presidential elections of the past 40 years. Currently, there are plenty of Republican voters in the rural Midwest and a large number of Democratic voters in the urban centers of the South; and that doesn't even begin to consider the hodge-podge that is California.
Fischer describes the four folkways in great detail, but seems to consider them to be highly resistant to meaningful change. He seemingly discounts any significant effects to these folkways from the immense waves of immigration that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Apparently, all of these new immigrants at best added only a little flavor to the currently existing cultures; which sounds strange when you consider that unionism and socialism, which in my opinion are major deviations from the original folkways, were introduced into this country by these immigrants.
Fischer does recognize the east-west migration of his four folkways - it's his rationale for why the folkways spread into distinct geographic regions. However, he doesn't seem to account for the migration of the South into the North during the early part of the twentieth century, when rural Southerners came north for good-paying factory jobs. Nor does he take into consideration the current migration of notherners into southern states and of Latin Americans into the United States; although to be fair these latest migrations are probably too recent to be included in a book published in 1989.
In summation, I think that Fischer's thesis of four dominant folkways does hold sway for the first century of the United States, but that these folkways have been morphing and comingling in ways both large and small over the entire history of the nation. The farther away history gets from 1780, the more these folkways have changed, the more these cultures have become less dominant within their regions, and the more these original cultures have come into competition with new cultures being introduced.
after, twenty years. one thing i still one to know are new englanders puritanical,are pennsylvania still pious, and are southernes still share the violence there ancestor borought here and aristoracy. do we still behave like this, is Mr fischer right or is he wrong.
er5603an, are you completely defined by your ancestors?
I've met New Englanders who are anything but puritannical, Pennsylvanians who are anything but pious, and southerners who are far from violent.
To some varying extent, we are all influenced by the culture in which we were raised, but (1) it's not as controlling as Mr Fischer proposes and (2) the cultural values of both the nation and its regions have not remained as static over the past 200+ years as the author theorizes.
OK......Never read the book, don't particualarly want to if the author really does refer to "four major migrations from England to North America " because if he does then he really should learn some actual history first.
Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales are 4 separate countries, migrations took place from all of them and I doubt very much if anyone inthe US who can trace their ancestry back that far would identify themselves as being 'English' if their ancestor was Scottish, Irish or Welsh.
"Scots-Irish", doesn't exist, two different peoples (unless you want to go back 2500 years! Yes there were Scots who were forcibly transplanted into Ireland, but I'm pretty sure they never considered themselves as "Scots-Irish".
Not all those from the United Kingdom who came to America were migrants as such, there were a large number of Scots (mostly captured in battle and during the numerous 'clearances') who were transported to the 'West Indies' to work as slaves on plantations there - among the first slaves in the region - because England had no space to house them in gaols (jails). After their sentence was complete they were not allowed to return to their homeland and many settled in the Carolina's - and subsequently became slave owners on their own plantations.
OK......Never read the book, don't particualarly want to if the author really does refer to "four major migrations from England to North America " because if he does then he really should learn some actual history first.
Professor David Hackett Fischer, Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University, should learn some actual history first?
I'd rather heed the opinion of an actual historian who took the time to read the book:
Quote:
An important and seminal work. No serious history is likely to question the existence of the four cultures Fischer identifies. No one else has so clearly differentiated them from each other. This volume will give direction not only to the author's future work but to the research of many other historians. -- Edmund S. Morgan, The New York Review of Books
I know about the great divide in Ulster between Protestants and Catholics.
But from a pure ethnical standpoint, do you think that Irish and Scottish settlers are practically the same people?
Is there any real difference between High Landers and Irish?
Weren't Caledonia and Hibernia inhabited by the same people?
Here's an interpretation of early Appalachian culture using the framework of Albions Seed, from the University of Virginia. This has been online a long time, but its still an interesting read:
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