Talk:Albion's Seed

Untitled
"Thus, he cannot help but notice that the Puritans and Quakers came from the areas of England with heavy Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences while the cavaliers and southern high-landers originated from the more Celtic areas."

This sentence is flawed because the Scotch Irish are a mixed people not primarily Celtic, and  the Cavaliers are primarily Anglo Saxon from powerful old families.


 * The whole book is flawed. He came up with his concept, and then he cherry-picked information to support it, twisted and revised historical data to his own preconceptions, and ignored contradictory data. Made a lot of money from this pseudo-history, too.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.68.134.1 (talk) 21:01, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree that this book is pseudo-history. This article deserves a section dedicated to the criticism AS generated after it was published.Jonathan f1 (talk) 04:44, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

NPOV?
This reads more like a review than an encyclopedia entry to me. I'm amazed it hasn't been tagged for neutrality. Nick xylas 20:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

The reason it reads like a review is because most of the "article" was blatantly plagiarized from Nelson Rosit's 1992 review of the book in the Journal of Historical Review. Robplunk 03:33, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Following up on Robplunk's comment: see that review at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p114_Rosit.html EMU CPA (talk) 22:34, 24 April 2008 (UTC)


 * That text was dumped into this article by an anon in 2006. I've reverted the article to its previous state. —Mrwojo (talk) 18:13, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

"Influenced" lines
The four parenthetical 'influenced" lines after each respective folkway seem to be more extrapolation than explanation of the text. Fischer does not discuss corporate culture, Congregationalism is not mentioned, current US popular culture is not discussed, and neither are "middle-class values" or industrial culture. I'm not saying that someone couldn't argue that was what Fischer was hinting at, but I do not believe that he claimed these influences in the book. If I'm wrong, feel free to let me know, but otherwise, these lines should be removed Nsfreeman 05:30, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Since there's been no objection, I'm going to go ahead and delete those lines. Nsfreeman 19:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Possible important influences that were not discussed
The following text was in the article but I removed it:

"The book does not attempt to dissect the cultural contributions of Baptist Rhode Island, nor even place much value on the merits of Catholic Maryland. Those are in fact, the two Christian denominations with the most numerous count in American statistics"

I removed the text because it implies that the author is making a judgement: "even place much value on the merits". The wikipedia author of these lines is probably placing too much importance on these areas. As far as I know Rhode Island's culture didn't expand much past RI itself, and Maryland wasn't Catholic for long. The fact that Catholic and Baptist are the two biggest denominations in the US is because of other reasons, not because of these two states. At least that is my understanding. So I don't think that the passage as written belongs in the article but I wanted to put it here in the talk page without just deleting it, perhaps people who know history better can weigh in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.34.239.79 (talk) 06:31, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Indeed, Rhode Island did not remain [predominately] Baptist either, the irony being that today, Rhode Island is more Catholic than Baptist and Maryland is probably more Baptist (or at least Protestant) than Catholic, or at least it (Maryland) certainly had been [more Protestant than Catholic) for a large part of its history after its original founding as a Catholic refuge. I agree that it is a coincidence that has little or no bearing on the fact of these two being the largest Christian denominations in the United States today. 173.28.244.122 (talk) 01:59, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Some reviews
With cherry-picked highlights. I am dropping only JSTOR URLs, not entire citations (too time-consuming right now). The article is (still) in a terrible state and needs a thorough overhaul, using reviews and other secondary sourcing.
 * "well-written, well-documented, and perspicacious"
 * "sometimes premised upon fuzzy evidence"..."in the process of dissecting and disagreeing with Fischer we must never minimize the boldness of his assertions or the provocative nature of his thesis. When every exception has been made and every critic heard, this will still be a monumental and seminal achievement" (a 14-page review essay)
 * "using dialect as evidence will require greater care in the selection and use of empirical evidence than Fischer attempts in Albion's Seed" (long review article on the linguistic evidence, four pages of endnotes)
 * "the unhistorical nature of so much of the analysis renders these portraits far less reliable than one expects from an encyclopedia"
 * "The Fischer of 1989 might profitably have consulted, however, the Fischer of Historians' Fallacies (New York, 1970), especially for the "fallacy of difference": "a tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclusion of its generic characteristics""
 * "His emphasis on the modern persistence of these folkways takes remarkably little account of the profound influence in the twentieth century of black culture and Jewish culture on our mainstream life. No word for Ne- groes except slaves appears in the index, and Judaism gets into it only in the form of his Brandeis students, whose ethnicity is regionally flavored. His in- sistence that the differences among American regions are greater "even to- day" than differences among European nations is simply dogmatically as- serted (p. 889) and fails to account for the homogenizing influences of mass culture." (a critique similar to that cited immediately above)
 * "What remains to be demonstrated, however, is whether the "folkways" he treats do actually constitute a comprehensive imperative" (one of the critiques is that Fischer extrapolates and generalizes way too much from sometimes scanty, individual nuggets of evidence).

I could go on: there is a ton more. Consensus is that this is a monumental and remarkable piece of work, notwithstanding the historiographical critiques uttered by some critics. Drmies (talk) 16:43, 8 March 2019 (UTC)


 * There is also a critique that his attempt to anglicize the Ulster contingent does not survive scrutiny. This reviewer also claims Fischer's work was met with a "chorus of negative scholarly opinions". Jonathan f1 (talk) 11:16, 5 August 2019 (UTC)