Reddit Reddit reviews Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history (Volume I))

We found 24 Reddit comments about Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history (Volume I)). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history (Volume I))
Oxford University Press
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24 Reddit comments about Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history (Volume I)):

u/vipergirl · 29 pointsr/Outlander

Jefferson and Washington had to legal right to free their slaves except under meritorious service It was illegal under Virginia law. Despite Jefferson's distaste for the institution, there was no legal route for him, much less passing a law in the state legislature or a Constitutional amendment at the national level.

It is also unfair to judge people by 21st century mores. If Jefferson or Washington were born today, they would very likely be completely different people as you would be if you were born in the 18th century. I am not a fan or advocate for demonising historical figures. Study, debate, but not demonise.

I encourage you to take a look at David Fisher's Albion's Seed. https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056

u/Sequiter · 10 pointsr/polandball

You might want to check out Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer for a very thorough explanation of US redneck culture and its origins. Fischer traces four distinct British cultural folkways as they are transplanted and adopted in the United States. Originally regional, these cultures spread across the country as it expanded.

Fischer explains that Southern backcountry culture is derived from "Scots-Irish" (actually an intermingling of Irish, Scottish, and English) people on the borders of Northern England, Southern Scotland, and in North Ireland from the 1600s.

Some markers of the Southern backcountry culture are honor, clan-orientation, a tendency toward a warrior pride, and supporting willfulness in children. This is a result of the centuries of warfare in the borderlands where the original Scots-Irish settlers came from.

This is quite distinct from, say, Virginia culture, which was all about gentrification, hierarchy, the "gentleman" class, wealthy plantations, and the like. The other two cultural traditions traced are New England Puritan culture and Delaware-valley Quaker culture. All of these traditions are currently still regionally expressed and have spread to varying degrees across parts of the US.

u/veringer · 10 pointsr/politics

This assumes America is or was one culture. Different historians classify people differently, but in the broadest sense there are at least:

  1. Yankee
  2. Southern (Dixie + Appalachian)
  3. Midland
  4. Western/Native/Frontier/Spanish

    Embedded in these groups is the idea of a founding culture (going back centuries) that informs attitudes and ideals. To your point regarding skepticism toward education, I think that's a feature primarily of the Appalachian group who were founded by one of the last waves of British immigrants. Glossing over a lot of history: they were poor, desperate, war-torn, and generally uneducated. Late to the party and culturally incompatible with many of the existing colonists, they headed for the hills and subsisted in a romantic but precarious manner. This is where we get the frontiersman and the rugged individualist myth. While tied to "southern" culture (for a number of interesting reasons that we will ignore for simplicity of this comment), they're really pretty distinct. For whatever reasons, this group has asserted itself and suggested their version of "American culture" is the correct one--and we've been living through this friction for a while.

    For a layperson, I suggest the following for further reading:

u/mhornberger · 9 pointsr/history

It predates modern politics by quite a bit, at least in my understanding. I've read Albion's Seed and American Nations, and from my understanding Appalachia and the Scots-Irish culture, plus the Deep South, have always supported war. All of them. The South is also saddled with a culture of honor, and, having been raised in Texas, I can say you lose serious face walking away from a fight.

We like to attribute the contemptuousness towards education as an outgrowth of their poverty, but I think the reverse is true. And I think the contempt for education comes from all the admiration going to "men of action," soldiers, fighters, etc. If you have to distinguish yourself with books and fancy words, you probably can't fight. Or worse, you're afraid to.

u/send_nasty_stuff · 9 pointsr/DebateAltRight

I'll start.

1.Our American Pravda by Ron Unz

https://www.unz.com/runz/our-american-pravda/

It's hard to choose from Unz's amazing collection of articles. This one is a great dive on how the United States media system has been bought out by marxism and corporate interests.

2.The Cause of the Second Civil War by Taylor Mclain

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/07/22/the-cause-of-the-second-civil-war-in-america/

Interesting take on why the civil war was fought and how the unresolved issues and lost capital and lives have affected the United States.

3.Biological Leninism by Bloodyshovel

https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/

Analysis on what really motivated the Bolshevik revolution and how we are still in the throws of these misguided ideologies.

Ok so I just realized how hard this is to narrow down three articles so since I'm the OP I'm going to cheat and post a few more.

Bonus.

4.Was Aaron Swartz Killed By An
MIT Satanic Child Porn Ring? By Yoichi Shimatsu

https://rense.com/general95/swartz.html

A friend of Aaron Swartz investigates his suspicious suicide that was memory holed by the press. What he discovers is horrifying.

5.Book Review: Albion's Seed by Scott Alexander (of Slate Star Codex)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/

Scott is a liberal but a wicked smart one. Here he does an outstanding summary on a long book called Albion's Seed: 4 British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer and gives his personal views on the author's thesis about the founding stock of the country. If you love history this is an awesome read and it's like taking an entire course in 60-90 minutes of reading. The details and cultural understandings outlined in this article have really helped me understand some of our wacky politics and disagreements in the modern age.

6.The Amazing Warnings of Benjamin Freedman

https://rense.com//general34/amaz.htm

I've posted this transcript frequently in comments on this sub but still want to include it here. It was one of the texts that really broke me away from liberalism and into dissident right thinking. It gives an entirely different perspective on the first and second world wars and the motivations of the countries and ethnic groups involved in those conflicts. Academia in collusion with media and western liberal governments have systematically covered up this perspective from the public conscientious.

7.The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S. by Michael Church

https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/

This is another essay not written by a dissident right person but does a good job on outlining how the american class system has manifested and calcified. There's no discussion on jewish involvement but you can see from the article how it would be easy for an elite class to be co-opted as they are less and less connected to the lower classes.



edit. if this thread gets some traction we could do it monthly and try not to repost articles shared in older threads. In a few months we should have a really great body of writing to share with new users. I look forward to reading all of your wonderful submissions!!

u/itsamillion · 6 pointsr/AskALiberal

In no particular order:

  • The Moral Animal. Robert Wright.
  • The Open Society and Its Enemies. Karl Popper.
  • Albion’s Seed. D. H. Fischer.
  • *Zero to One.* P. Thiel.
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
  • Critique of Pure Reason. I. Kant.
  • A Treatise on Human Nature. Hume.
  • The Death of the Liberal Class. C. Hedges.
  • A Theory of Justice. Rawls.
  • The Origin of the Work of Art. M. Heidegger.
  • The Denial of Death. E. Becker.
  • American Colonies. A. Taylor.
  • The Selfish Gene. R. Dawkins.
  • Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud.
  • The Hero with a Thousand Faces. J. Campbell.
  • The Birth of the Artist. Otto Rank.
  • Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung.
  • The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan.
  • Sexual Personae. Camille Paglia.
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People. D. Carnegie.

    Sorry I got tired of making links. I’m on my phone.
u/watrenu · 5 pointsr/europe

>Even before (and it'd have to be true, right?) July 4, 1776, there was a distinctly 'American' flavor of the Anglo-Saxon identity that existed among the otherwise 'British' people who colonized the area and took swathes of it away from competing Dutch and French claims on the aboriginal people's territories.

true, Albion's Seed is a particularly interesting book on the English roots of some aspects of American culture

> some flavoring from the 18th, 19th, and 21st century additions of Europe and Latin America.

as well as Africa, an oft ignored source of many modern American traditions

>How valid do you think a "Macedonian" identity is?

a popular conspiracy theory (may even be true in some part, not sure) is that Tito created it

http://www.cc.ece.ntua.gr/~conster/English/PageData/mac_tito.htm

u/Ayupitsme · 5 pointsr/pics

Anybody interested in the origins of the Amish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Mennonites, hell, just about every Anglo culture in the United States and how they STILL influence regional culture, pick this book up: https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056

u/Galle_ · 3 pointsr/PoliticalHumor

Albion's Seed is a good overview.

u/hga_another · 3 pointsr/KotakuInAction

The most basic source is said to be Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, one of which is the one from which the South's "honor culture" came, and that our blacks learned.

And my mother is Cajun, grew up on a rice farm in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana does tend to be a particularly unique part of America, not sure how many lessons you could usefully draw from your corner of it to the rest of the South. And I'm from the SW corner of Missouri that's culturally South, also unique in being at a meeting place of the West and Midwest.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/MapPorn

http://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-Cultural/dp/0195069056

The first chapter is hard to get through, but then you get really into it.

u/liatris · 2 pointsr/TrueReddit

What you refer to as thug culture is actually the culture they picked up from Celtic immigrants to the US. It is commonly known as "cracker culture" or "redneck culture." Immigrants from the Celtic borderlands immigrated to the Southern US whereas more cultured immigrants from South Britain moved to the Northern US particularly the New England area. The people who moved South were considered lawless, violent, had touchy pride where they would kill someone for insulting them, promiscuous, didn't value work much, didn't value industriousness or entrepreneurship, were anti-intellectual etc.

The Celtic culture (pre-Anglicization of course) had disastrous results for anyone who adopted it, regardless of race.


Saying that single-mother homes are synonymous with black homes ignores the fact that black people had higher marriage rates than white people up until the 1960s when the left allowed single mothers to receive welfare benefits.

Erol Ricketts, a demographer and sociologist with the Rockefeller Foundation, found that between 1890 and 1950, blacks had higher marriage rates than whites, according to the U.S. Census. Until then, black women were more likely to get married than white women-and that was despite the high mortality rates among black men, which left fewer of them available for marriage and made more black women widows. In three of four decennial years between 1890 and 1920, black men out-married white men, with a virtual tie in 1900 at about 54%.


Source....

Erol Ricketts, "The Origin of the Black Female-Headed Families," Focus, Spring/Summer 1989, 32-37, available at http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121e.pdf


Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

You can listen to the relevant parts of the last book here. It's written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, a black, Harvard educated economist. He covers the issue of the origins of "ghetto culture"in about the first 2.5 hours.

It's fascinating the influences of Scottish culture on black culture. Most don't realize but Gospel music came directly out of Scottish culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_American#Folk_and_Gospel_music

>There has also been a long tradition of influences between Scottish American and African American communities. Psalm-singing and gospel music are a mainstay of African American churchgoers. The great influx of Scots Presbyterians into the Carolinas introduced African slaves to this form of worship.[23] The style of gospel-singing was also influenced by Scottish Gaelic-speaking settlers from the Western Isles, particularly North Ulster. Scottish Gaelic psalm-singing, or "presenting the line" as it is technically known, in which the psalms are called out and the congregation sings a response, was the earliest form of congregational singing adopted by Africans in America. [23]

>The first foreign tongue spoken by some slaves in America was Scottish Gaelic picked up from Gaelic-speakers from the Western Isles.[23] In a North Carolina newspaper dated about 1740, an advertisement offers a generous reward for the capture and return of a runaway African slave who is described as being easy to identify because he only spoke Gaelic.[24] In one church in Alabama the African American congregation worshiped in Gaelic as late as 1918, another indication of the extent to which the Highlanders and Islanders spread their culture, from North Carolina to Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.[25]

The line connecting Gaelic psalm singing & American Music (2007) Line Singing Conference at Yale.

Ben McConville (31 August 2003). "Black music from Scotland? It could be the gospel truth". Scotland on Sunday. Retrieved 2007-12-18.

You also see the Celtic influence on American black culture in traditions like "jumping the broom" at weddings, calling hog entrails "chittlins," saying "ax" for ask, "acrost" for across those and other pronunciations that have been termed ebonics are actually antiquated pronunciations that can be traced back to immigrants from the Celtic borderlands.

u/Mynameis__--__ · 2 pointsr/Anarchism

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard. It is an excellent read.

Another book that is similar to this (but much longer) is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer

u/MiyegomboBayartsogt · 2 pointsr/DarkEnlightenment

Albion’s Seed by David Fischer: Scottish Presbyterians used to wear red cloth around their neck to symbolize their religion; other Englishmen nicknamed them “rednecks”. This may be the origin of the popular slur against Americans of "Scots/Irish descent, although many other etiologies have been proposed.

u/TaylorS1986 · 2 pointsr/AskAnAmerican

> but it's important to remember that in a very real sense, pre-revolution British history is also American history. We may not emphasize that part of the narrative in many history classes (I think that's a mistake), but the transference of fundamental ideas and attitudes in politics and culture is undeniable.

The best book on this is Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.

u/I_pity_the_fool · 1 pointr/AskHistorians

> I am trying to figure out where.

Maybe this book?

u/silence7 · 1 pointr/climate

Blinton actually does have what the conspiracy theory believers claim is the rationale for the alleged conspiracy of scientists. It isn't much of an explanation, since the scientists allegedly running a conspiracy could generally make a lot more money working for industry.

My impression is that its more a case of projection. A large chunk of the denialism is in fact perpetuated by paid PR people, though there are some with other motives. The other big reason for acceptance of the conspiracy theory is that a large chunk of the US population is very into conspiracy theories for cultural reasons. Read the section on what David Hackett Fischer terms the "borderer" cultural group in his book Albion's Seed for something of a discussion about how these cultural issues impact modern American politics.

u/Itziclinic · 1 pointr/atheism

This is broadly correct. If anyone is interested in the different groups that initially came to the Americas to settle (and when/why) I'd recommend a book called Albion Seed.

u/Flonn · 1 pointr/AskReddit

If I remember correctly, I read it in Albion's Seed. I'll see if I can dig up an exact source.

Another term that I learned to have a origin is Cracker, which was an expression of the British to describe Scots, whom they considered to be an unruly group, with loud voices, akin to the crack of thunder.

These terms were brought specifically to the southern US, as a lot the poorer 'rednecks' from England settled there.

u/blueblarg · 1 pointr/AskHistorians

I feel like there's two ways I can interpret your question, so I'll answer both just to be safe.

If your question is "Why did I pick so many Scotsmen as examples?" then the answer is simply that most of my historical knowledge focuses on North America and Europe (although I've gotten really interested in African history recently), so that was the area of study I readily had examples for (although I did include a Korean example). I'm almost positive you'd be able to find similar examples in any other culture.

If your question is "Was there a cultural reason so many Scotsmen were willing to risk themselves in battle?" then the answer would be "probably". Scotland has a notoriously warlike culture. When they weren't busy fighting the British, they were busy fighting each other. As one Scottish proverb puts it, "twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion." It's been theorized that the reason the Scots were so notoriously ready to thrown down was because they had a culture of honor, a phenomenon that often pops up in societies that are economically dependent upon herd animals for their livelihood, as well as an absence of effective law enforcement (Scotland fits the bill for both of those things). In short, if most of my wealth was in the form of herd animals, and there was no law enforcement around, then I would be a very attractive target for anyone looking to gain instant wealth, at the expense of my livelihood. Therefore in order to survive, I would have to make it clear to the world that I was not a shepherd to be fucked with. I could accomplish that by delivering swift and disproportionate vengeance upon anyone that attempted to take advantage of me. If I didn't do that, it would show the world that I was an easy target. When fighting and violence is that central to your life, you probably aren't extremely adverse to war, either.

Interestingly enough, the concept of a culture of honor also applies to inner-city drug dealers. When you're carrying all your wealth (whether it be money or drugs) on your person, and you have no option of reporting a theft due to the illegal nature of your wealth, you pretty much have no choice but to deliver justice yourself.

The Scotch-Irish are an especially noteworthy subculture, with a well-deserved reputation for being fiercely independent and not afraid of violence. These are people who left Scotland and settled in Northern Ireland. Many of them took the leap of immigrating to America, and were a key group in settling/conquering the American frontier (which back then was much further east than what most people think of), as well as the Appalachians, an area not too dissimilar from their native Scotland (Here is a relevant map. Spotting the Appalachians should be pretty darn easy).

Many of the greatest fighters in American history were Scotch-Irish. No less than 12 American Presidents were Scotch-Irish (and that's not including President Obama, who believe it or not has some Scotch-Irish from his mother's ancestry), including Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant, both famous for their skill in war. Other notable Scotch-Irish warriors include Chesty Puller, George Patton, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stonewall Jackson and James Webb. That's just a quick sampling, barely scratching the surface.

Anyways, I'm finished talking your ear off. If you'd like to know more, I highly recommend either James Webb's history (appropriately titled Born Fighting), or Fischer's Albion's Seed.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that both the Hatfields AND the McCoy's were Scotch-Irish, two groups notorious for their propensity for violence.

u/Atlas_B_Shruggin · 1 pointr/PurplePillDebate

yes! did you read albion's seed or thomas sowell's black redneck, white liberal?

john fonte Walter Russell Meade (?)talks about your tradition as the "Crabgrass jacksonian" tradition

neat

u/blueoak9 · 1 pointr/FeMRADebates

> Do you have a citation for men being forced into marriage for this purpose? I assume this doesn't include marriage for political purposes.

I don't include political marriage.

Here's a citation:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195069056/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=48273543768&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15867766022954682348&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_6sk3d1qdgm_e

"Albion's Seed" is a huge, thick examination of four streams of migration and culture from Britain into the American colonies. It is so huge and thicnk that I'll just summarize the bit I am referring to.

The first of four sections examines the Puritan culture in New England. he refers to laws forcibly placing unmarried men into households if they left he paternal home, until such time as they married and moved into am marital home.

Later, 1890, a tax on bachelors was proposed that prompted the formation of one of the first men's rights groups.
http://gynocentrism.com/2013/12/20/mgtow-movement-of-1898/
The article goes into quite a bit of detail and this proposal was by no means the first.

u/mnemosyne-0002 · 1 pointr/KotakuInAction

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