Abby's Reviews > Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“The most important fact about American liberty is that it 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 expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be. It has also become the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States. In time, this plurality of freedoms may prove to be that nation’s most enduring legacy to the world.”

Perhaps the most riveting 900-page history book I’ve encountered. In this thick but winsomely narrated tome, David Hackett Fischer makes the case that four waves of British immigrants forever shaped American culture. These four groups (Puritans in New England, cavaliers in Virginia, Quakers in the Delaware Valley, and border settlers in the backcountry) had distinct beliefs and folkways that continue to influence politics, institutions, and communal life in these regions many centuries later. Fischer is a master of comparison and contrast, and I read with unbridled enthusiasm. Personally, as someone who lives in heavy Virginia cavalier country, but as a transplanted backcountry settler from the Carolinas, I feel like Fischer unlocked so many cultural mysteries held by these two regions with which I’ve become intimately familiar.

(P.S. Read this and heard about it from my favorite mysterious, anonymous Substack, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith.)