Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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November 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 7
As one of the most imaginative historians in contemporary America, David Hackett Fischer has produced a work that may put his fellow scholars’ teeth on edge. Historians, rather conservative in temperament, are reluctant converts when their choice ideas are thrown into question. Yet Fischer’s latest book, Albion‘s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press) will fascinate them as well as the general reading public. Lucid, dramatic, and always entertaining, the thick, handsomely illustrated volume may safely be called a modern classic, and comparisons to Tocqueville are inevitable. The historian Gordon Wood declared that the Brandeis University professor has delivered a “revisionist blockbuster” that “has uncovered America’s political and cultural roots in the countryside of Britain.” The title suggests as much. Albion was the ancient Greek name for the island.
Fischer shows how particular religious persuasions, coupled with certain regional habits in four distinct areas of the kingdom, helped build four equally separate cultures in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America. Each British district and its American counterpart had special ways of doing things and thinking about them. This broad-sweeping reinterpretation flies in the face of long-standing scholarly assumptions and even popular myths. Neither the early frontier nor the ethnic mix of later centuries can alone explain who we are and why Americans so cherish liberty. According to Fischer, these British roots, long neglected in the textbooks, require reexamination. And he provides it.
Fischer has an infectious smile and cherubic face that belie a steely intelligence and a no-nonsense approach to historical verification. Trained at City College, Baltimore, Fischer graduated from Princeton and later from Johns Hopkins, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1962. The young Brandeis teacher gained quick notice—even notoriety—for Historians’ Fallacies (1970). This irreverent exposure of his elders’ scholarly sins sent professors scurrying to find their names in the index. A steady outpouring of other books, articles, and edited works established him as a major figure. As a History Book Club Main Selection, Albion’s Seed , however, reaches a much wider audience and arouses more praise than anything he has written before. It inaugurates an ambitious design to reinterpret, rather than merely retell, the whole of American history. (This interview took place in May at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.)
What led you to write the series of books on American history of which Albion’s Seed is the first?
The effort comes out of a dissatisfaction with the state of history writing today. Many of my colleagues feel the same way. Some three generations ago scholars confined their interests to what we might call old political history—the study of Presidents, parties, wars, treaties, and the like. Then, in the sixties,