  I've just finished reading urlLink Albion's Seed ,  ( 1989)  by David Hackett Fischer.  I was browsing the shelves of a Half- Price Books a few years ago,
 during a lunch hour,  and spotted it.  Recommended to me by none other than Sir James,  I bought it,  and it decorated my bookshelf for the next several years,  always intimidating me with its bulk (
898 pages)  But last spring I decided it was time to read through the various books which had been bought but not read by me,  so into Albion's Seed I went.  And I was hooked!  For a long,  mostly-
academic sort of book,  it's fascinating.  The colonial migrations to the New World can be divided into four rough time periods,  groups of people,  and geographical entities,  consisting of:
 East Anglians to Massachusetts ( 1629- 41)  The English Puritans South England to Virginia ( 1642- 75)
 The Cavaliers North Midlands to the Delaware Valley ( 1675- 1725)  The Friends Borderlands to the Backcountry ( 1717- 1775)
 The Borderers Fischer then goes into each folkway in great deal,  examining each in their everyday life:  life- ways,  death- ways,
 building- ways,  election- ways,  church- ways,
 child- rearing ways,  sex- ways,  language- ways,
 farming- ways,  and all sorts of other cultural " norms"  for each culture.  He found that in each American colonial experience,
 the traditions which became dominant for an American region could be traced to a specific part of Britain.  The Appalachian people of the United States,  for example,  share an enormous number of traditions with their Scots- English borderer ancestors,  one of which is a tendency to violence and extreme distrust of strangers.
 Large parts of backcountry Carolina spoke Gaelic as late as the 1900's,  in fact.  I was fascinated in how I could see myself,  and my own personal tendencies,  fit right into the cultural " norms"
 and " ways"  that Fischer identified.  My family is from the West,  from eastern Oregon,  but almost of all of my ancestors immigrated from Kentucky or Tennessee.
 Other branches of the family came from Virginia,  although where in Virginia I'm not quite sure.  Possibly there is a distant connection to the Lees,  so not all my ancestors were of the " backcountry"  folkways,
 but- from what I know of my family- most of them were.  That makes sense,  when I think about which of the four folkways I most closely identify with.  It's the backcountry way.
 I'm hardly quick to violence,  nor do I live in a log cabin,  but in most cases I prefer direct action,  violent if necessary,  over diplomacy or negotiation.  I can negotiate when I have to,
 but it always goes against the grain.  Also like the backcountry,  I prefer plainness,  and in general care very little about niceties of custom and " proper"  ways of doing things.
 Perhaps most importantly,  I have a very strong stubborn and independent streak,  tending sometimes to contrarianism,  which would be recognizable to anyone familiar with Andrew Jackson or John C.  Calhoun.  Back to Albion's Seed ,
 Fischer concluded with a brief summary of U. S.  electoral results as interpreted regionally,  and argued that,  though none of the regions has maintained itself in any sort of a pure way,  and though some regions (
such as New England)  now have harldy anyone left of their original British stock,  still the regions maintain much of their original tint,  and over the course of American history,  the regions have tended to vote consistently,  with just the ocassional aberration like FDR in 1932,
 Eisenhower in 1952,  or Reagan in 1980.  Fischer's final words on the regions of America:  Regional diversity has created a dynamic tension within a single republican ssytem.  It has also fostered at least four different ideas of liberty with a common cultural frame.  These four ideas are not European,
 though they derive from there.  They are:  1)  The Puritan idea of ordered freedom 2)  The cavalier idea of hegemonic freedom 3)  The Quaker idea of reciprocal freedom 4)
 The backcountry idea of natural freedom Each of these four freedom ways still preserves its seperate existence in the United States.  The most important fact about American liberty is that is has never been a single idea,  but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another.  This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and exapnsive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be.  There are many explanations for why America is what it is,  and all of them have some part of the truth.
 Fischer's work is an invaluable aid to anyone seeking to understand what made the United States.
