Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America: VOLUME I (America: A Cultural History)

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On the other hand, according to Boorstin (1958), the Puritans were completely non- utopian and practical in the way they lived their daily lives. Because they considered their theological questions answered, says Boorstin, they could focus less on the ends of society and more on the practical means for making society work effectively. Eventually, historical circumstances would even sweep the religious authoritarianism away, leaving behind a legacy self-government, local control, and direct democrac y. Quakers had surprisingly modern ideas about parenting, basically sheltering and spoiling their children at a time when everyone else was trying whip the Devil out of them.

Time Ways: "Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life." Possibly related: 16% of Quaker women were unmarried by age 50, compared to only about 2% of Puritans. how’s that? Because if you’re talking about the senate, that benefitted small northern states like vermont, maine, and delaware a lot more than the south.

Quakers referred to as “mongrel marriages” to “unbelievers” were highly denounced. Outmarriage led to several Quaker meetings taking disciplinary action. There were no less than sixteen steps in a forthcoming Quaker wedding. In part due to the prohibitions on intermarriage, the massive influx of immigrants into the new colonies, and the gradual decline in political participation. The marriage practices of the Quakers mixed a fairly contemporary conception of romance with a great deal of formality. Social Ranks

Like the Puritans, the Royalists were not the first English settlers in their respective region. The earliest Virginians had founded the Jamestown Colony in 1607. Also, like the Puritans, the Royalists turned out to be more successful administrators than the settlers who had come before. But while the Jamestown settlers had been incompetent in many ways, they had set the stage for a successful agricultural export industry based on tobacco (Woodard, 2011).Why? As the ship Arbella battled the waves, he told its passengers, 'We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work...we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the way of God.' But how had it come to pass that these serious citizens were leaving England for a distant continent whence most would not return?

So Red/Purple/Gold don’t reflect pre-colonial structure. Are they meaningful clusters at all, or just an artifact of applying clustering to a gradient? Their conception of liberty has also survived and shaped modern American politics: it seems essentially to be the modern libertarian/Republican version of freedom from government interference, especially if phrased as “get the hell off my land”, and especially especially if phrased that way through clenched teeth while pointing a shotgun at the offending party. This is an excellent book, informed by a wide knowledge and love of the folkways of both the Eastern USA and its cultural ancestors in the British Isles. Its particular virtue is that it dispels the popular myth, prevalent in other former British colonies (notably Australia) as well as the US, that somehow the migrants underwent some sort of sea-change in mid-ocean, landing as fully fledged cultural citizens of whatever brave new continent they had arrived in. How many allegedly historical documentaries, let alone Hollywood fictions, we have seen that show the disembarking colonists with speech, dress and attitudes that in reality took decades if not centuries to evolve in response to the conditions of their new homes. Many families were related before they left England, and after they arrived they intermarried, creating an oligarchy of prominent families with names such as Winthrop, Dudley, Mather, Saltonstall, Hutchinson and Davenport. The children of clergymen tended to marry each other, and a clerical elite was perpetuated over generations, as, for example, Cotton Mather followed his father Increase Mather and his grandfathers Richard Mather and John Cotton into the ministry. I’m not trying to quote mine, but this is a kind of funny contrast. It’s a tough sell that we’re in a more irreconcilable conflict now than when America was literally at war with itself.Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, north of and in-between Cambridge and Oxford, closer to Cambridge.