✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Book Review: Albion’s Seed | Slate Star Codex

slatestarcodex.com · 144,660 words · saved by 1 readers

Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does. In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US. I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesak

Book Review: Albion’s Seed | Slate Star Codex Home About / Top Posts Archives Top Posts Comments Feed RSS Feed Slate Star Codex Blogroll Economics Artir Kel Bryan Caplan David Friedman Pseudoerasmus Scott Sumner Tyler Cowen Effective Altruism 80000 Hours Blog Effective Altruism Forum GiveWell Blog Rationality Alyssa Vance Beeminder Elizabeth Van Nostrand Gwern Branwen Jacob Falkovich Jeff Kaufman Katja Grace Kelsey Piper Less Wrong Paul Christiano Robin Hanson Sarah Constantin Zack Davis Zvi Mowshowitz Science Andrew Gelman Greg Cochran Michael Caton Razib Khan Scott Aaronson Stephan Guy

Explore this link on the map →

related reading