Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America is a 1989 book by David Hackett Fischer that details the folkways of four groups of people that moved from distinct regions of England (Albion) to the US. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted and that these cultures provide the basis for the modern United States.^[1]

Four Folkways

The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:

• East Anglia to Massachusetts

The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims influenced the Northeastern United States' corporate culture)^[2]

• The South of England to Virginia

Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture)^[3]

• North Midlands to the Delaware

The Friends' Migration (Quakers influenced the Midwestern United States' industrial culture)^[4]

• Borderlands to the Backcountry

The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish, or border English, influenced the Western United States' ranch culture and the Southern United States' common agrarian culture)^[5]

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. Fischer covers voting patterns and dialects of speech in four regions which span from their Atlantic colonial base to the Pacific.

Fischer remarks on his own connective feelings between the Chesapeake and Southern England in Albion's Seed, but attempts to flesh that out in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement--a corollary of his work in this book.^[6]

References

External links

• Albion's Seed Grows in the Cumberland Gap, by the University of Virginia

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