Eighty percent of Americans have no British ancestors. According to David Hackett Fischer, however, their day-to-day lives are profoundly influenced by folkways transplanted from Britain to the New World with the first settlers. Residual, yet persistent, aspects of these 17th Century folkways are indentifiable, Fischer argues, in areas as divers as politics, education, and attitudes towards gender, sexuality, age, and child-raising. Making use of both traditional and revisionist scholarship, this ground-breaking work documents how each successive wave of early emigration--Puritans to the North-East; Royalist aristocrats to the South; the Friends to the Delaware Valley; Irish and North Britons to the American backcountry--contributed to, and continue to affect, ingrained cultural differences between various regions in the United States.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. Itis a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.