Volume 37, Number 1 · February 1, 1990

Mothers of Us All

By Edmund S. Morgan
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
by David Hackett Fischer

Oxford University Press, 946 pp., $39.95

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then. Only a few are bold enough to marshal the manifold particulars of history into some larger configuration that seems to make sense both here and there, both then and now. The rest of us can then devote monographs to demonstrating that what seems to make sense does not in fact do so when tested against what actually happened at a particular time and place.



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