Albion's Seed

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Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (ISBN 0195069056) is a 1989 book by David Hackett Fischer that utilizes an approach developed by the French school of the Annales begun by Georges Dumezil and developed further by Fernand Braudel that concentrates on both continuity and change over long periods of time. The book's focus is on the details of the folkways of four groups of British people that settled and moved from distinct regions of the United Kingdom to its colonies in America. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, providing the basis for the modern United States.

By writing about the four migrations as discussed in the four main chapters of the book his book is easily contrasted with that of other American historians of the 20th century who have written history that is almost exclusively concerned with the new. One of the unique contributions Fischer's book makes is a total, or unified social history rather than a compartmentalized fragment. As the author explains in the preface:

Instead of becoming a synthesizing discipline it [U.S. social history] disintegrated into many special fields--women's history, labor history, environmental history, the history of aging, the history of child abuse, and even gay history--in which the work became increasingly shrill and polemical. (p. ix).'

The book's descriptions of the four folkways grounding American society is one of the most comprehensive, almost encyclopedic, guide to the origins of colonial American culture. According to Fischer, the foundation of American culture was formed from four mass emigrations from four different regions of Britain by four different socio-religious groups. New England's constitutional period occurred between 1629 and 1640 when Puritans, most from East Anglia, settled there. The next mass migration was of southern English cavaliers and their servants to the Chesapeake Bay region between 1640 and 1675. Then, between 1675 and 1725 thousands of Quakers, led by William Penn settled the Delaware Valley. Finally Scots-Irish settlers from the borderlands of Britain and Northern Ireland migrated to Appalachia between 1717 and 1775. Each of these migrations produced a distinct regional culture which can still be seen in America today. The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:

East Anglia to Massachusetts

The Exodus of the English Puritans

The South of England to Virginia

Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants

North Midlands to the Delaware

The Friends' Migration

Borderlands to the Backcountry

The Flight from Middle Britain and Northern Ireland

In short, Fischer brings back from recent oblivion the colorful regional stereotypes of American history. New Englanders really were puritanical; Southern gentlemen genuine aristocrats; Quakers were very pious; and Southern highland clans feuded as they had in the old country. Strikingly, the "hearths" described by Fischer seem to reflect Canute the Great's four feudal earldoms of England and are found similarly in the Catholic Church in England's four archdioceses. Even the casual identification with American commonwealths seem striking, as the core of four extant republican Anglo-America cultures. These hearths of colonial diversity have expanded to the four United States Census Bureau regions. Fischer includes satellite peoples such as Welsh, Scots, Irish, Dutch, French and German—even Italian and a treatise on Black slaves in South Carolina. The book does not attempt to dissect the cultural contributions of Baptist Rhode Island, nor even place much value on the merits of Catholic Maryland. Those are in fact, the two Christian denominations with the most numerous count in American statistics [1]. Fischer covers voting patterns and dialects of speech in four regions which span from their Atlantic colonial base to the Pacific.