Comments on: In Which I Repent

By: Lex

Lex — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 01:36:54 +0000

Matra, you are missing the whole point of the book. the culture gets transmitted even to people who have not ethnic link to the people who introduced the culture. This is very obvious in my own observation of “yankee” culture in my own home, which was composed of parents who are Irish/German and Russian /Polish and had not a drop of Yankee blood. I’ll just say along with Jay: Read the book.

By: Jay Manifold

Jay Manifold — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 22:31:05 +0000

Fischer demonstrates quite convincingly that African-American culture (including even dialect) is overwhelmingly derived from the English settlers of the South, a combination of southwestern England and the region around the Irish Sea. Read the book. You won’t regret it.

By: Matra

Matra — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 22:49:14 +0000

Yeah, like i’m sure descendants of Border areas (mostly Scots-Irish) are really responsible for Dallas’s high murder rate!! Check the ethnicity of the people who live in the area and you’ll find few are from the Albion seed.

By: andrewdb

andrewdb — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:18:35 +0000

It was interesting for me to compare the language Fischer cites as being used by the Puritans (a new Zion in the wilderness, etc) with the language used by the Mormans – but then Joseph Smith was from upstate NY.

One also needs to read Albion’s Seed with Walter Russell Mead’s “Special Providence” – which is the one that created the “Jacksonian” foreign policy meme. Mead’s categories closely track Fischer’s, but uses different names for them.

By: Lex

Lex — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 13:53:58 +0000

Jay, I am going to have to go on a road trip for some barbecue. Glad you finally got to it.

I would suggest as a follow-up, Alan Macfarlane’s two volumes The Riddle of the Modern World and The Making of the Modern World. They are a companion to DHF which are, I think, equally profound.

By: David N. St. John

David N. St. John — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 02:20:02 +0000

Jay, thank you for going ahead and reading “Albion’s Seed”. I fall in either Category 2 or Category 3 of the folks above, to whom you are apologizing for your sloth. I read it when it first came out, and have urged it on many of my friends, but never specifically upon you.

I also found it fascinating from the personal standpoint. I reckon that I am a mix of all four of the great migrations, but mostly the Puritan and Borderer diasporas to the Midwest and beyond. My parents were from Missouri/Indiana, and I actually grew up in Rockford, in northern Illinois, and I now live in Wichita, Kansas. But the most important thing is the continuing effects on the political and social values of a good half of the American nation, and the continuing influence on Presidential elections politics, as Fischer demonstrates at some length.

Now, Jay, are you ready for the REALLY BAD NEWS? I have your next three reading assignments for you! The first is C. D. Darlington’s “The Evolution of Man and Society”. First published in 1969, it was “controversial”, politically incorrect, and sort of suppressed at the time of its publication, at least in the sense that it was given the silent treatment by most of the rest of the social science crowd. Darlington’s book attempted to do what H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” did, but from the standpoint of human evolution and population genetics. That made Darlington anathema to the “blank slate” folks, and they screamed like wounded cateagles, and circled the academic wagons.

The second reading assignment is Darlington’s “The Little Universe of Man”, which must have come out about 1974, and served to revise and extend his remarks in “The Evolution of Man and Society”. I think the two should be read together; particularly fascinating and important are Darlington’s takes on both Communism and Islam.

The last book on the list is brand new; Nicholas Wade’s “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors”. Think of it as a 40-years newer first section of Darlington, and you won’t be too far off. But Wade has the advantage of much more detailed knowledge of the genetics of the human diaspora from northeast Africa, and that makes the book a fabulous read.

I shall be very interested to hear from all the rest of the Chicago Boyz, about these suggestions. Who else has read them, and how did you evaluate them, when you were done?

David N. St. John