Albion's Seed Quotes

“This hostility to unnatural sex had a demographic consequence of high importance. Puritan moralists condemned as unnatural any attempt to prevent conception within marriage. This was not a common attitude in world history. Most primitive cultures have practiced some form of contraception, often with high success. Iroquois squaws made diaphragms of birchbark; African slaves used pessaries of elephant dung to prevent pregnancy. European women employed beeswax disks, cabbage leaves, spermicides of lead, whitewash and tar. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, coitus interruptus and the use of sheepgut condoms became widespread in Europe.14”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins!18 Altogether, the Puritans created a sabbatical rhythm of unique intensity in the time ways of their culture.19”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“There was no heat in these buildings, partly because the earliest meetinghouses also served as powder magazines, and fires threatened to blow the entire congregation to smithereens. They were bitter cold in winter. Many tales were told of frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets. It was a point of honor for the minister never to shorten a service merely because his audience was frozen. But sometimes the entire congregation would begin to stamp its feet to restore circulation until the biblical rebuke came crashing down upon them: “STAND STILL and consider the wonderous work of God.” Later generations built “nooning houses” or “sab-baday houses” near the church where the congregation could thaw out after the morning sermon and prepare for the long afternoon sermon to come. But unheated meetings remained a regional folkway for two hundred years.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord’s Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“This idea of collective liberty also was expressed in many bizarre obligations which New England towns collectively imposed upon their members. Eastham’s town meeting, for example, ordered that no single man could marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows. Every town book contained many such rules.4 The General Court also passed sweeping statutes which allowed the magistrates to suppress almost any act, by any means. One such law, for example, threatened that “if any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation, we shall punish him severely.” The definition of “exceeding the bounds of moderation” was left to the magistrate.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“That case was not unique in the sexual history of New Haven. When a second deformed pig was born in that troubled town, another unfortunate eccentric was also accused of bestiality by his neighbors. Even though he could not be convicted under the two-witness rule, he was imprisoned longer than anybody else in the history of the colony. When yet a third defective piglet was born with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head, the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor. The people of New Haven seem to have been perfectly obsessed by fear of unnatural sex. When a dog belonging to Nicholas Bayly was observed trying to copulate with a sow, neighbors urged that it be killed. Mrs. Bayly refused and incautiously made a joke of it, saying of her dog, “if he had not a bitch, he must have something.” The magistrates of New Haven were not amused. Merely for making light of bestiality, the Baylys were banished from the town.12”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds" quoted by an Appalachian women with an air of pride.' (This quote explains a lot about my family)”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“American ideas of freedom developed from indigenous folkways which were deeply rooted in the inherited culture of the English-speaking world.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“When one southerner was asked why so many people were killed in his region, he answered that “there were just more folks in the South that needed killing.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“To a modern mind, hegemonic liberty is an idea at war with itself.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“In the late twentieth century, national television broad-casters are trained to use the accent of Salt Lake City—the American equivalent of BBC English.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“four new major generals, two were aging Confederate veterans who in combat referred to the Spanish as “the Yankees.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“The same cultural values which caused secession were also partly responsible for its eventual defeat.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Without consciousness of contradiction, southern masters cast their defense of slavery in libertarian terms, and demanded the freedom to enslave.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“political style characterized by intensely personal leadership, charismatic appeals to his followers, demands for extreme personal loyalty, and a violent antipathy against all who disagreed with him.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“This new dialect of England’s ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam—and Old Amsterdam”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies; that culture created slavery.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“After 1714, Britain was ruled by German kings who cared little about America, and English ministers who knew less. One of them believed that Massachusetts was an island.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“Whenever a culture exists for many generations in conditions of chronic insecurity, it develops an ethic that exalts war above work, force above reason, and men above women.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies—which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion or nationality.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)

“The history of the early abolitionist movement,” writes historian Arthur Zilversmit, “is essentially the record of Quaker antislavery activities.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history Book 1)