To make his point Fischer has somewhat overstated his case for the continuity of British culture in America. Certainly the formative or constitutional period of America was overwhelmingly the work of British peoples. Many of their values and institutions remain. But how much of mass culture; the products of the entertainment industry and the mass media, can still trace its origins to 17th and 18th century England? Perhaps the last volume ( Albion's Seed is the first of a five volume cultural history of America) will deal with these concerns. Speech Ways: "Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar." Not exactly a confusion, but more a disappointment: this map doesn’t provide the confirmation I’d hoped for that Californians, Seattleites, and other “Left Coasters” are displaced New Englanders – which would complete the circle of “Liberal Democrats = Puritan/Quaker population subgroup”. It’s also disappointing how little data they have for the Mountain West in general; I don’t know if that’s because there weren’t enough people there to show up, or because they’re a mix of every genetic lineage and don’t fit into any of the clusters nicely. Wasting time in Massachusetts was literally a criminal offense, listed in the law code, and several people were in fact prosecuted for it. Their conception of liberty has also survived and shaped modern American politics: it seems essentially to be the modern libertarian/Republican version of freedom from government interference, especially if phrased as “get the hell off my land”, and especially especially if phrased that way through clenched teeth while pointing a shotgun at the offending party.

How Fischer arrived at his generalization [about the existence of a "family of dialects" called "Appalachian"] based on [his cited] sources is confusing ... the manner in which Fischer arrives at this conclusion is questionable. This, however, had an interesting result: now that same-sex marriage was officially exactly like any other marriage, this also meant gay people had the right to a church wedding. Some of the priests were pretty pissed, and church minister basically said “you’re government employees, deal with it”. In 1639, Massachusetts declared a “Day Of Humiliation” to condemn “novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered” The book has won a number of awards including the American Association of University Presses prize for overall excellence in 1996. [10] See also [ edit ]

There are several themes that emerged from this weighty tome: America has been fundamentally shaped by the voluntary nature of the great migrations that populated her regions (unlike the compulsory and centralized migrations engineered for New France and New Spain); slavery developed very slowly in America and was generated by the unique transplanted cultures that grew there, not the other way around; the regional differences in the United States are often more dramatic than between countries in Europe (e.g. the wealth disparity between New England the South in the late 1800s was similar to the difference between Germany and Russia in the same time period); the four folkways had some things in common, but generally speaking they were all antagonistic to one another, which was all too evident from the American Revolution to the present day; these regional differences have often led to omnibus strategies for electing presidents, an attempt to find a candidate who appeals to at least two of the traditional folkways, such as Harrison (1840), Taylor (1848), Pierce (1852), Eisenhower (1952) and Bush (1988). Quakers had surprisingly modern ideas about parenting, basically sheltering and spoiling their children at a time when everyone else was trying whip the Devil out of them. This is all interesting as history and doubly interesting as anthropology, but what relevance does it have for later American history and the present day?

My surname is Conroy from Laois, descended from Tadhg Óg Ó Duinn the O’Duinn chiefs of Oregan in North Co Laois. By as early as the 1570’s the younger brother of the chief (Tanaiste) had converted to protestantism. He and other Ó Duinn family members later took part in the Plantation of Ulster, around 1620’s, as protestants, in Antrim! hegemonic liberty was no longer the privilege of a small elite but of every autonomous citizen securely in command of self. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Robert E. Lee are examples of American leaders from this tradition. Nevertheless, some of Fischer’s statements must be treated with caution, especially regarding the British roots of American folkways, for to be honest he doesn’t know Britain quite as well as he imagines. Some examples, which probably are self-evident to most of my fellow Brits, but perhaps less so to the Transatlantic persuasion: Gehring, C. T. (Ed.). Delaware Papers (Dutch Period): A Collection of Documents Pertaining to the Regulation of Affairs on the South River of New Netherland, 1648-1664. 1981, Genealogical Publishing Company. And I guess we still haven’t ruled out the maximally boring explanation that interbreeding is entirely geographic and north-south is a bigger distinction than east-west so we’re just seeing the country divided into five equal-sized latitudinal bands.)Myers, Albert Cook. Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1630-1707. Google Books. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1912. Web. I entertained myself ... by examining slowly the dress and the countenance of the female concourse and I can assure you with all ingenuousness that neither more simplicity, cleanliness and taste in the first nor natural and simple beauty in the second can be imagined. I am firmly persuaded that the coloring of Rubens and the carnations of Titian can never imitate what nature offers her in the hue and complexion of simple Quaker women who have not a grain of powder or drop of oil on their persons. (p. 551). Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia’s long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron “bound away”―from the folksong Shenandoah―captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what is today. Specifically, part of the mission of Albion's Seed is to revive the "Teutonic germ theory" of pre-WW2 historiography, which states that America achieved power and liberty based on unique English cultural achievements, rather than geographic or social advantages (for example, slavery). Virginian recreation mostly revolved around hunting and bloodsports. Great lords hunted deer, lesser gentry hunted foxes, indentured servants had a weird game in which they essentially draw-and-quartered geese, young children “killed and tortured songbirds”, and “at the bottom of this hierarchy of bloody games were male infants who prepared themselves for the larger pleasures of maturity by torturing snakes, maiming frogs, and pulling the wings off butterflies. Thus, every red-blooded male in Virginia was permitted to slaughter some animal or other, and the size of his victim was proportioned to his social rank.”

On the other hand, according to Boorstin (1958), the Puritans were completely non- utopian and practical in the way they lived their daily lives. Because they considered their theological questions answered, says Boorstin, they could focus less on the ends of society and more on the practical means for making society work effectively. Eventually, historical circumstances would even sweep the religious authoritarianism away, leaving behind a legacy self-government, local control, and direct democrac y. Fischer asks why these similar countries went different ways. Both were founded by English-speaking colonists, but at different times and with disparate purposes. They lived in the first and second British Empires, which operated in very different ways. Indians and Maori were important agents of change, but to different ends. On the American frontier and in New Zealand’s Bush, material possibilities and moral choices were not the same. Fischer takes the same comparative approach to parallel processes of nation-building and immigration, women’s rights and racial wrongs, reform causes and conservative responses, war-fighting and peace-making, and global engagement in our own time–with similar results. Pennsylvania was very successful for a while; it had some of the richest farmland in the colonies, and the Quakers were exceptional merchants and traders; so much so that they were forgiven their military non-intervention during the Revolution because of their role keeping the American economy afloat in the face of British sanctions. His recruits – about 20,000 people in total – were Quakers from the north of England, many of them minor merchants and traders. They disproportionately included the Britons of Norse descent common in that region, who formed a separate stratum and had never really gotten along with the rest of the British population. They were joined by several German sects close enough to Quakers that they felt at home there; these became the ancestors of (among other groups) the Pennsylvania Dutch, Amish, and Mennonites.The source agrees with Fischer’s contention that Quakerism concerns death. The leadership in Pennsylvania for the death penalty to be abolished adheres to the notion that death is the fulfillment of life. It represented the ultimate transcendence of the mortal person and an escape from the world’s corruptions. When a member of a Quaker family truly passed away, the whole family gathered and experienced a moment of the utmost seriousness. Economic Activities Another big factor in the US civil war was free trade vs. protectionism — southerners wanted to keep manufactured goods as cheap as possible (free trade) whereas northerners wanted tariffs on manufactured goods to allow for some build-up of industry. One can draw a lot of comparisons to the modern situation in terms of the free trade situation being basically reversed, and also the different views on immigration.

Marriage Ways: "Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce."

Scott again takes Fischer's bait and repeats propaganda used to justify violence against the rural poor, as if it represents a neutral judgment made by well-informed observers on the ground. Fischer probably presented this material mostly humorously, but for Scott it has become more serious. Time Ways: "Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life." Color each grid’s dot with the largest cluster having ancestors there. So if in one square there were 10 ancestors of people in cluster 1 born and there and 15 of cluster of two (and zero of everyone else), color it cluster 2. Scale each grid’s dot by the number of total “pedigree annotations”, that is the total number of people with ancestor’s who were born there. I’m not trying to quote mine, but this is a kind of funny contrast. It’s a tough sell that we’re in a more irreconcilable conflict now than when America was literally at war with itself.