English in the Americas

Urban planner David Sucher has some thoughts on David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, a book that "traces four British migrations to the US and their enduring influence on American character: the Puritans to New England (later influencing areas well to the west), the Quakers to the Delaware Valley, the Cavaliers to Virginia, and the English-Scottish border inhabitants to the Appalachian backcountry." [Although Fischer is a professor at Brandeis, I have never met him because of a peculiarity in the structure of the university: all the Americanists have their own department, while the rest of us (mostly Europeanists) are in a separate department for comparative history.]