Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Categories: History

Historian David Hackett Fischer argues that American culture grew from four waves of British migrants who arrived between 1629 and 1775. Each carried a distinct set of customs from its home region. Fischer follows the Puritans to Massachusetts, the Cavaliers to Virginia, the Quakers to the Delaware Valley and the borderlanders to the backcountry. He compares their speech, building, family life, religion and ideas of freedom, and traces how those differences still shape American regions and pol…

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• Balaji Srinivasan: “That's a great book. Many have mapped Fischer's Puritans and Quakers to Blues, and Cavaliers and Scotch-Irish to Reds.”