Albion's Seed

What Hacker News says

1. cobbzillaFeb 2026
   There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.
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2. VoodooJuJuOct 2024
   In order to truly understand this article, it helps to have read Albion's Seed.

   It's true that Spanish influence isn't taken into account enough in this article, but the article is still pretty sound in the importance it puts on Puritan and Borderer (Scots-Irish) cultural influence, as these are the two foremost cultural forces at odds with one another to this day, not just in California, but across the United States. The Okies in this case would be Borderers.

   And again, although we see other non-Anglo cultural forces, immigrants typically align and integrate more or less with either the Puritan or the Borderer ethos.

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3. VoodooJuJuOct 2024
   Right, this article doesn't make a case tracing Puritan and Borderer settlement to modern day California, but the book Albion's Seed does, and it makes a very convincing case.

   The book examines a variety of folkways, naming conventions, and lineages in the cultural regions throughout old England, discovers those same things present in regions throughout America, and then follows the continued expression of those folkways and lineages all the way up to the present day.

   And although we can find similarities between Puritans or Borderers with other cultures around the world, we can't make a convincing case that, for example, the Japanese had a significant influence on American culture and politics, because again, the primary sources revealing the folkways examined in Albion's seed are quite distinct and can be accurately traced from old England, to American settlement, and again up to the present day. Puritan architecture, food, naming conventions, and ancestry is quite distinct and well-understood, and we see evidence of those things throughout the United states, whereas there's not much Japanese architecture, food, place-names, or influential dynasties here in America.

   Anyway, Albion's Seed is a very good book that I highly recommend reading.

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4. alephnerdOct 2024
   > Even if Anglo-Saxons are now a minority

   They were never a majority in California.

   Take a look at census data as well as reading basic California history.

   The largest ethnic groups in California have always been Hispanics and Germans.

   Albion's Seed is a good book, but Fischer's analysis was limited to Appalachia, New England, the Delaware Valley, and Virginia. He did mean for it try to be a generalized explanation for the entire US.

   Furthermore, if you look at the history of legislation in the West and Midwest, it's also fairly distinct in comparison to the East Coast.

   Abolitionism, trade unions, Humboldtian ideal, women's suffrage, etc all had extremely strong support across much of the West and Midwest, and this itself was due to post-1849 immigration from Central Europe following the failed revolutions of 1849.

   Just think about it in general - almost everything that you think is "American" is actually German. Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc.

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5. kpsNov 2023
   Border reivers were both English and Scottish, and not always particularly concerned about whether their targets were ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’.

   Sowell probably drew from Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, which argues that US culture arose from four different British subcultures.

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6. GloomyBootsOct 2023
   I’ll take the other side. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging race. Today people equate race with a biological essentialism that was grafted onto it in the recent past, but that’s not what race ever meant. Acknowledging race is nothing more than acknowledging that different peoples exist and exhibit group differences. Those differences can generally be readily assessed based on cultural and phenotypical cues without resorting to genotyping. It’s a social construct, but so is all human knowledge. And there are rough edges, but that doesn’t invalidate it. The distinction between “chair” and “table” is also socially constructed and can have rough edges, but that doesn’t render them or “furniture” as a whole useless.

   I wholeheartedly agree with liberals that indigenous minority groups, and some others with special circumstances, like Blacks in the US, should receive special protections to preserve their identities and safeguard their interests in the face of a situation where they don’t have the numbers to counteract majoritarianism. I also think that the founding people of a nation deserve similar recognition. My father is from an immigrant family. My mother has ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. They have qualitatively different relationships with America on that basis. He comes from an aspirational, urban, working class family, she from a well-established, rural, petit bourgeois family, and they have qualitatively different relationships with America on that basis, too. Solving one problem doesn’t require giving up on the other.

   A return to the original meaning of tolerance is warranted. Which is learning to cooperate despite differences, not erasing them. And, importantly, it’s a two-way street, not a struggle session in which one side is made to atone perpetually for real or perceived past sins.

   There’s a point where these differences disappear, but they’re surprisingly durable. Just read Albion’s Seed and you can see how smaller ethnic differences between groups of English colonists are still at work in the political landscape today.

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