Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I) QUOTES

1 " This hostility to unnatural sex had a demographic consequence of high importance. Puritan moralists condemned as unnatural any attempt to prevent conception within marriage. This was not a common attitude in world history. Most primitive cultures have practiced some form of contraception, often with high success. Iroquois squaws made diaphragms of birchbark; African slaves used pessaries of elephant dung to prevent pregnancy. European women employed beeswax disks, cabbage leaves, spermicides of lead, whitewash and tar. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, coitus interruptus and the use of sheepgut condoms became widespread in Europe.14 "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

2 " Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins!18 Altogether, the Puritans created a sabbatical rhythm of unique intensity in the time ways of their culture.19 "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

3 " This idea of collective liberty also was expressed in many bizarre obligations which New England towns collectively imposed upon their members. Eastham’s town meeting, for example, ordered that no single man could marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows. Every town book contained many such rules.4 The General Court also passed sweeping statutes which allowed the magistrates to suppress almost any act, by any means. One such law, for example, threatened that “if any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation, we shall punish him severely.” The definition of “exceeding the bounds of moderation” was left to the magistrate. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

4 " That case was not unique in the sexual history of New Haven. When a second deformed pig was born in that troubled town, another unfortunate eccentric was also accused of bestiality by his neighbors. Even though he could not be convicted under the two-witness rule, he was imprisoned longer than anybody else in the history of the colony. When yet a third defective piglet was born with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head, the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor. The people of New Haven seem to have been perfectly obsessed by fear of unnatural sex. When a dog belonging to Nicholas Bayly was observed trying to copulate with a sow, neighbors urged that it be killed. Mrs. Bayly refused and incautiously made a joke of it, saying of her dog, “if he had not a bitch, he must have something.” The magistrates of New Haven were not amused. Merely for making light of bestiality, the Baylys were banished from the town.12 "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

5 " There was no heat in these buildings, partly because the earliest meetinghouses also served as powder magazines, and fires threatened to blow the entire congregation to smithereens. They were bitter cold in winter. Many tales were told of frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets. It was a point of honor for the minister never to shorten a service merely because his audience was frozen. But sometimes the entire congregation would begin to stamp its feet to restore circulation until the biblical rebuke came crashing down upon them: “STAND STILL and consider the wonderous work of God.” Later generations built “nooning houses” or “sab-baday houses” near the church where the congregation could thaw out after the morning sermon and prepare for the long afternoon sermon to come. But unheated meetings remained a regional folkway for two hundred years. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

6 " threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

7 " Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord’s Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

8 " We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds" quoted by an Appalachian women with an air of pride.' (This quote explains a lot about my family) "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

9 " In 1767, an epidemic broke out on board a crowded emigrant vessel sailing from Belfast to South Carolina; the unscrupulous owners had packed 450 people into its hold and more than 100 died at sea. Another ship bound from Belfast to Philadelphia ran out of food in mid-passage. Forty-six passengers starved to death; the survivors were driven to cannibalism and some even consumed the flesh of their own families. The transatlantic journey became more dangerous in the eighteenth century than it had been in the seventeenth. Mortality in ships sailing from North Britain approached that in the slave trade.17 "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

10 " But the Quakers were not entirely liberated from magic. One particular variety of supernatural belief came to be very widely shared among them. The idea of the Inner Light led them to that form of superstition which is commonly called spiritualism today. In the seventeenth century there were repeated instances of attempts by Quakers to communicate with the dead, and even to raise them from the grave. In Worcestershire, for example, one English Quaker dug up the body of another, and “commanded him in the name of the living God to arise and walk.” There were many similar events in which Quakers attempted to resurrect the dead.11 "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

11 " Shame had an emotional power which it has lost today. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

12 " In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

13 " four new major generals, two were aging Confederate veterans who in combat referred to the Spanish as “the Yankees. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

14 " Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

15 " Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

16 " This new dialect of England’s ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

17 " The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

18 " Quaker settlements were “the first scene of a major, widespread, obviously successful assertion of the child-centered, fond-fostering, nuclear family in early America and most likely in the Anglo-American world. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

19 " This relationship created intense feelings of anxiety and fear among the “common folk,” in a manner that is not easy for people of another world to understand. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

20 " Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture. "

― David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)