Albion's Seed
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| Author | David Hackett Fischer |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Subject | U.S. social history |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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1989 |
| Pages | 946 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 20012134 |
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 who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the modern United States. Fischer explains "the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture." Fischer describes Albion's Seed as a modified Teutonic germ theory within the framework of the Frontier Thesis and the migration model.
The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:
Fischer includes satellite peoples such as Welsh, Scots, Irish, Dutch, French, Germans, Italians and a treatise on black slaves in South Carolina. Fischer covers voting patterns and dialects of speech in four regions that 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 the book.
Fischer states that the book's purpose is to examine the complex cultural processes at work within the four folkways during the time period. Albion's Seed argues, "The legacy of four British folkways in early America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States."
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