Speech Ways: "Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar." Cousin marriage was an important custom that helped cement bonds among the Virginian elite, “and many an Anglican lady changed her condition but not her name”.

The Quakers began arriving in great numbers in 1675, settling in the Delaware Valley, spreading out into what is today western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Sandwiched between Puritan Massachusetts and Royalist Virginia, Woodward (2011) refers to this region as the Midlands.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. It's also interesting because it helps to understand how long term interaction with a particular geography and set of social circumstances can set up what may become entrenched patterns. It reminds me that it is easier to retain bad rather than good patterns of behaviour. I particularly liked that the author identifies the four groups differing characteristics according to food, sex, architecture, colours, sex, politics and liberty. On Local Polity and liberty he ascribes:

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. When they migrated to Massachusetts, they brought with them their own particular folkways. These included many of the customs and values they had been accustomed to in East Anglia. They were also deeply religious and brought a utopian vision of a society that would bring about God’s kingdom on earth, governed by a particular Puritan interpretation of the Bible. They only accepted people into their communities that were willing to conform to their Puritan brand of Calvinism; dissenters were punished or exiled. While America is less than 20% British, it is still 60% northern European. The main reason America has remained so British culturally is because the millions of German, Irish, Scandinavians, Dutch, and other Europeans who came to these shores, along with their descendants were close enough racially to assimilate culturally. Millions of Americans who are not ethnically Anglo-Saxon are culturally Anglo-Saxon. Massachusetts clergy were very powerful; Fischer records the story of a traveller asking a man “Are you the parson who serves here?” only to be corrected “I am, sir, the parson who rules here.” The argument developed in "Albion's seed" is that American culture is based on four strands of English regional cultures that pursued a life of their own once they found a home across the Atlantic.

Albion's seed

Virginian society considered everyone who lived in a plantation home to be a kind of “family”, with the aristocrat both as the literal father and as a sort of abstracted patriarch with complete control over his domain.

Now Han et al take this field high-tech with the publication of Clustering Of 770,000 Genomes Reveals Post-Colonial Population Structure Of North America (h/t gwern, werttrew) Marriage Ways: "Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce." Fischer remarks on his own connective feelings between the Chesapeake and Southern England in Albion's Seed but attempts to flesh them out in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, a corollary of his work in the book. [8] Origins [ edit ] Many families were related before they left England, and after they arrived they intermarried, creating an oligarchy of prominent families with names such as Winthrop, Dudley, Mather, Saltonstall, Hutchinson and Davenport. The children of clergymen tended to marry each other, and a clerical elite was perpetuated over generations, as, for example, Cotton Mather followed his father Increase Mather and his grandfathers Richard Mather and John Cotton into the ministry.

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But until reading Scott’s review of Albion’s Seed, I hadn’t really thought about different historical and cultural patterns among “regular old” white people — and it seemed to align very nicely with some of my experiences. On the other hand, my best friend at the time ended up being a young man of (literally) Puritan aristocratic lineage whose mother was a professor of literature, so I guess there’s always exceptions to prejudice. Plus I’ve massively mellowed out over the years, and now my only real reason for disliking upper-class types is their politics. Like you, I try my best to judge people individually. This is an excellent book, informed by a wide knowledge and love of the folkways of both the Eastern USA and its cultural ancestors in the British Isles. Its particular virtue is that it dispels the popular myth, prevalent in other former British colonies (notably Australia) as well as the US, that somehow the migrants underwent some sort of sea-change in mid-ocean, landing as fully fledged cultural citizens of whatever brave new continent they had arrived in. How many allegedly historical documentaries, let alone Hollywood fictions, we have seen that show the disembarking colonists with speech, dress and attitudes that in reality took decades if not centuries to evolve in response to the conditions of their new homes.