Selected History Links

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This link is to a free online excerpt from the book, Albion's Seed : Four British Folkways in America, which I use continuously. I may have to get a new copy soon....I'm wearing the first one out, and I've had it only a little more than a year. I'm very grateful to the author and to the folks who were responsible for making a portion of the book available online.

Hands-down, this is my favorite history book!

This online excerpt focuses on the settlers of the Backcountry, who were mainly from the embattled border country in southern Scotland and northern England. Among many other juicy details, the author explains the origins of that well-known ancestors' game: Musical Cabins, or, Leave No Trace for Your Frenzied Descendants.

But the book itself not only about the Backcountry settlers: Albion's Seed examines - in great detail and with wonderful scholarship - three more groups of early American immigrants from Britain: the Puritans of Massachusetts, the Quakers of the Delaware Valley and the "distressed Cavaliers" of the Tidewater country (along with their indentured servants, not a few of whom were kidnapped from the London streets).

Regional variations of the English language, types of cooking and food, attitudes toward old age, dying, sex and gender, toward community, religion, leisure, power and authority, and even the idea of "liberty" itself...all of these can be traced back to their origins in the British Isles with surprising accuracy.

It also traces the migration of the cultures that they brought with them: all the way across the country and through time to the present day. It examines the persistence of regionalism in the United States, and considers some of the reasons why, in this age of mass media dominance, we continue to have distinctly different ways of life in different parts of the U. S.

Below is a quote from the folks at Amazon.Com, or you can simply click here to go to the Amazon.Com page for Albion's Seed.

I think that Albion's Seed is a delightful addition to any genealogist's or historian's library.

"This fascinating book is... a... cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.

"While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations..."