Being a contrarian and something of a miserabilist my summer reading tends towards the weighty and obscure. This summer it included Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America a 900 page cultural history of English speaking colonial America by David Hackett Fisher. The four folkways are chronologically the Puritians, what he calls the "Cavaliers" in Virginia and the Chesapeake/Virginia tidewaters, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Scots-Irish in Appalachia. For each group he discusses speech, building, family, marriage, gender, sex, child rearing, naming, aging, death, religion, magic, learning, food, dress, sports, work, time, wealth, rank, social practice, government, power and freedom.
It's a huge undertaking. Plus, it's a real book. All the scholarly material is in actual footnotes which sometimes go on for pages and contain charts and graphs. And there are maps -detailed demographic maps - and drawings of people and their clothes and their houses.
In some ways, all this work reinforces regional stereotypes and traces them back to their origins in 17th century England. One thing is quite clear: these people hated each other in England and hated each other after they got here. Since reading Hackett I've started to think of the American Civil War as a continuation of the English one: the English aristocracy came to Virginia explicitly to escape the Puritans in England just as the Puritans had come to the New World to escape them. Puritans in Massachusetts went back to England to fight alongside Cromwell against the Anglicans. So civil war seemed built into America's cultural DNA far before the rise of slavery and race-based ideologies, its roots being both religious and cultural.
Further, if you want to understand the Tea Party, don't think about the original one in Boston. The New England Puritans certainly weren't anti-government and anti-tax. Think of the Whiskey Rebellion. If you want to understand Sarah Palin, think of Andrew Jackson.
I especially liked the Puritan onomastics (systems of naming). Referring to Sussex England, source of many Puritan families, Hackett writes:
"Sussex Puritans made heavy use of hortatory names such as Be-courteous Cole... Safely-on-high Snat, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White... Humiliation Scratcher... and Mortify Hicks. A classic example was an unfortunate young woman name I-fly-fornication Bull of Hailsham, Sussex, who was made pregnant in the shop of a yeoman improbably called Goodman Woodman."
This was rather specific to Sussex and didn't really take in New England, which I think is a shame. However, they did use necronyms: if a child died the next child of the same sex was given its name.
In any case, he then traces internal migration in the US over the past 300 years and voting patterns associated with each group. Well into the 19th century, European visitors commented that the regional differences in the US were greater than those in any one European country. The disparities in per capita income between New England and the mountain South were greater than those between Germany and Russia as late as the 1880s.
In addition, every president except two has come from one of these groups. Although one could argue the Roosevelt doesn't fit because his name is Dutch. The two presidents? Kennedy - Irish Catholic, and the current occupant of the White House.
