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David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
I hate to use a superlative to describe any piece of scholarly
work, because there are so many fine pieces of work out there, but I can't
think of any single serious history book that has left me more impressed.
It is scholarly -- and shows an astonishing command of a truly amazing
collection of primary and secondary sources. At the same time, it
is beautifully written -- one of the few serious scholarly history books
that I can, in good conscience, recommend to any reasonably well-educated
person -- and have confidence that they will find it interesting.
Mot important of all, it is extraordinarily important, because it shows
the still dominant role that America's four British folkways play in creating
both the national and regional cultures that still dominate American society.
I read this book while writing my book Concealed
Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral
Reform (Praeger Press, 1999), and Albion's Seed made it
possible for me to adequately determine the origins of the backcountry
Southern culture of violence that created such havoc in the early Republic
-- and created the structure of violence and weapons control that still
dominate the current political debate.
I can't adequately summarize this massive and wonderful
book in the available space, but let me give you just a clue as to the
power of it. It provides a persuasive explanation for regional variations
in housing design, birth month distribution, naming conventions, cooking
styles, and male/female power relationships -- and without ever seeming
forced to me, the skeptic of "one theory does it all" approaches.
I can't recommend a book more highly than this.