A more substantive question: I haven't (yet) read Albion's Seed, but the basic thesis sounds plausible based on my personal experiences living in various parts of the eastern US. However I'm curious as to the exact explanation(s) Fisher advances for why these patterns persisted in the face of later immigration and internal migration.

For example, does Fisher see cultural patterns "imprinting" themselves on newly arrived populations via children (e.g., from school and peer group experiences), as being perpetuated by local social/political/economic elites (with others modeling their behavior), or what?

However I'm curious as to the exact explanation(s) Fisher advances for why these patterns persisted in the face of later immigration and internal migration.

immigration is the key issue. are irish catholics culturally at all like english calvinist? are yankee methodists in missouri at all like german catholics? there are certainly differences; e.g., all the catholic groups in the north were anti-temperance, and the irish were generally anti-abolitionist. but over time fisher seems to suggest that characteristics of the institutions and cultural norms of the anglo-saxon settlers assimilated the newcomers more or less. e.g., john f. kennedy was a boston brahmin despite his irish catholic antecedents. germans & scandinavians in the upper midwest easily assimilated into the communitarian outlooks of the first yankee settlers. part of this is selection bias; it seems that the upper midwest was ecologically similar to parts of northern europe anyhow. the key would to be consider any possible differences between the numerous germans who settle in central texas vs. those who settled around st. louis (which was a yankee outpost in missouri from what i know).

internal migration *between* the regions doesn't seem important to him. for most of american history emigration was simply moving west, so "greater new england" = the northern half of new york, ohio, indiana, illinois and all of michigan and wisconsin (pushing all the way to the pacific northwest). southern indiana and ohio OTOH were settled by scots-irish from the southern uplands. and so forth.

I haven't (yet) read Albion's Seed, but the basic thesis sounds plausible based on my personal experiences living in various parts of the eastern US.

it isn't just the eastern US. on the west coast san francisco to seattle is arguably part of greater new england. southern california is more diverse, with a stronger influence from various parts of the midwest which night have a less new english imprint (obviously, this is for the white population before 1950 when california was less diverse).

the question is: which aspect of scotch-irish cultural history is tied to a higher mccain vote? steve claims that they admire a fellow pugnacious irishman. a reasonable hypothesis. but one that seems more plausible to me is that people in these areas are more racist*. there is evidence to back this up from the democratic primary-- hillary clinton who is not scots irish dominated in the *same* exact appalacian areas McCain did. this suggests that Obama is the cause, not the candidate he is facing. for those who would reply to this observation by saying that appalacians were merely turned off by his "elitism" etc., i point you to to this:

The number of white Democratic voters who said that race influenced their choice on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the Clinton-Obama nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said that race was an important factor in their vote, and more than 8 in 10 of them backed Mrs. Clinton, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

racism played a minor role in this election. but if we're going to understand why some regions differed from others i think we need to take it into account as a plausible hypothesis.

*definition of racist = judging individuals by their race instead of of by more important attributes like intellect, policies, and experience.

if anyone is wondering i think obama likely gained more voters on the basis of race/racism than he lost. it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to suggest that the his 7% gain in the black vote compared to kerry was partially due to racism on the part of his black supporters. [there's a seperate moral discussion to be had about whether it's equally wrong to make an exception to vote for ones race vs. never voting for a given race of people... but that's for another day.]

counter hypothesis: the scotch-irish have a rank order of preference based on how high the "otherness" index of someone is. e.g., white is better than black. scotch-irish better than generic white protestant. white protestant better than white catholic.

I think I've mentioned this here before, I would also recommend Kevin Phillips's "Emerging Republican Majority" (written in 1968) and "The Cousins' Wars". In the former (more famous book) Phillips discusses how demographics (with much emphasis on analyzing the groups DHF identifies) would favor the Republican party in the years to come (as they indeed did). In the latter he discusses how the political identities of the various American ethnies(?) emerged out of the the English Civil War, American Revolutionary War and American Civil War.

the key would to be consider any possible differences between the numerous germans who settle in central texas vs. those who settled around st. louis

Actually, Michael Lind has written extensively about German Texan's liberal tendencies. He's Liberal Texas German, so he may be overstating things.

Hmm, my experience as a "Scotch-Irish" runs counter to the "order of preference" hypothesis.

As an Englishman who has not visited America and gets my impressions of American states mainly from films and TV, the word that comes immediately to my mind when these six states are mentioned is 'redneck'. Followed by 'banjo' and 'chainsaw'.

It would be interesting to see a county-by-county map of Alabama, to see if his support was stronger in the northern upland parts of the state. Most of the states listed (except Oklahoma) are upland south states.
It is also ironic that these areas of the south were the most pro-union during the civil war, but that has as much to do with climate (most of them were too cold to grow cotton, tobacco , or any of the other slave-friedly crops) than with ethnic Scots-Irish culture.

Are scotch-irish those Irish people who prefer Scotch to Brandy, or are they a group of people who are out to scotch the Irish?

As an Englishman who has not visited America and gets my impressions of American states mainly from films and TV,

I don't subject you to my understanding of British politics and culture derived from watching episodes of "Are You Being Served?", so please do not subject me to your aforementioned understanding of American politics and culture.

Thank you.

ny times has county level maps galore
http://elections.nytimes.com/200...sident/ map.html

Of course descendants of the scots irish like McCain. The military is a favored occupation for one thing and these cheap, violent, rebellious, whiskey swilling, plain talking personalities recognize a kindred spirit. Two hundred years in this country and my mother's western Virginia accent still had echos of Scotland similar to many Canadians. The family tree has a lot of early ancestors listed as Irish but they are the hillbilly variety, not the Catholic Irish who arrived later.

That New York Times map down to county level is very informative. It shows how the Democrats turned mostly red states into blue states by working the places with the most votes, the large cities that are their traditional base.

It was interesting to see how closely the final division of states mapped onto American dialectal variations.

The term "Scots-Irish" is really incorrect since these people are Scots whose ancestors lived in Ireland for a couple of generations and are not descended from the indigenous Irish. The more correct term is Scottish-Americans.

Speaking of county maps, here are two I found particularly interesting: county-by-county results for Appalachia for the 2008 presidential elections (from the New York Times) and minority populations in Appalachian counties (figure 4 in an Appalachian Regional Commission report). To quote from the ARC report: "Despite the growth in the minority population throughout Appalachia, minorities still make up a tiny share of the population in many areas of the region. ... In 2000, minorities were less than 10 percent of the total population in 310 of the region's 410 counties, and less than 5 percent in 215 of the counties."

In a cursory search I couldn't find comparable minority population figures from earlier in history, but if this is what Appalachia looks like now then I'm guessing that 150, 100, or even 50 years ago the region was likely extremely ethnically homogeneous, especially in central and northern Appalachia -- which I think makes Razib's "otherness index" counter-hypothesis at least plausible.

The term "Scots-Irish" is really incorrect since these people are Scots whose ancestors lived in Ireland for a couple of generations and are not descended from the indigenous Irish. The more correct term is Scottish-Americans.

that's really historically naive and somewhat ignorant. the scots-irish were a melange. and it is important to distinguish them from the descendants of highlanders who settled in cape fear and spoke gaelic, and traditionally voted the opposite of the scots-irish. on the first approximation it is important to differentiate between various irish groups and not bracket the ulster protestants with the gaelic and anglo-irish catholics, but in the process there's no need to perpetuate the ulster creation myth in totality (that is, indigenous catholic convers to presbyterianism totally assimilated to a scots ethnic identification with a few generations in ulster). and scotland itself is "5 nations" so the term "scottish" doesn't have enough specificity for our purposes.

These books are all more or less correct, though, most of the Scots-Irish don't identify themselves as such; on census forms, they claim "American" ancestry, despite their largely Scottish and English surnames. Also, I read that ethnic Germans also moved into the predominantly Scots-Irish areas, and many of the people in places like Texas, or Arkansas are actually a mix of British and German. Also, historically, the dominant culture in the deep South was the aristocratic culture of the English Cavalier, transplanted from the estates of southwest England to the plantations of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, etc.

Reading about them, it seems that historically, they had a tendency towards feuding and disorder, as well as illicit business (bootlegging, marijuana growing), though not so much today, with occasional lapses into religious fundamentalism. Their culture almost seems somewhat similar to the Pashtun culture of Afghanistan, where all spending money is used to purchase weapons, smuggling is the preferred profession, and feuds go on for generations, along with the periodic lapse into religious fundamentalism. Also, the egalitarianism of the culture; among the Pashtuns, traditionally, there was no single tribal leader; all elders were theoretically equal.

don't think the nature of the scots-irish is all cultural but to some extent a group of common inherited personality characteristics. My excuse for a sometimes embarrassing preference for plain speaking is "it's in the genes" but my wife insists that it's just same excuse as comedian Flip Wilson's "the devil made me do that".

Here's a book about the Scotch-Irish that I read years ago and liked. Don't remember much, but I do recall feeling that my life was enriched by the effort. Rang true about the Scotch-Irish side of my family too.

More.

Now I'm off to drink some whiskey, kill some Indians, and watch some NASCAR.

IIRC, Albion's Seed defines 'Scots-Irish' as including people from the English/Scottish border areas, traditionally noted for feuding, raiding, and rustling.

Frenchy, that's a fairly ... stupid reading of who and what the Scots-Irish were and are. Read Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" and also "Roughing It" (to see Scots-Irish out West).

For Scots-Irish, the dominant need is freedom. Being their own man. This often leads to violence when various groups come into conflict in rough environments. Such as the wars with natives in places like Georgia, Alabama, etc. or in Wyoming, New Mexico, or Arizona.

Family is often the only barrier between disaster or success, but many notable Scots-Irish were essentially Orphans. Such as Andrew Jackson.

The Mountain West is just as well a good representation of the Scots-Irish as Appalachia. Personal independence is generally the main concern.

The Mountain West is just as well a good representation of the Scots-Irish as Appalachia. Personal independence is generally the main concern.

yes. but exclude the mormons; they're communitarian yankees.

Actually being Scotch-Irish (as much as anything), I'm probably too close to see the big picture.

are irish catholics culturally at all like english calvinist?

Actually they are, since Irish Catholicism was permeated by a French Catholic sect called Jansenism, a very Calvinist version of Roman Catholic practice emphasizing a sort of rough-and-ready asceticism very much like the Geneva-based Calvinists and even a bit like the Scottish Presbyterian version of Calvinism propagated by John Knox. Jansenism was almost branded a heresy by the Pope back when the French were killing and exporting Huguenots and French priests who were persecuted for J-ism exported themselves to Ireland where they taught at diocesan seminaries.

Also, left unmentioned in the otherwise excellent Albion's Seed was an invasion/immigration of Western Lowland Scotland in the eighth and ninth centuries by Irish from Ulster, which was reciprocated six-seven centuries later by the Protestant Calvinists called Presbyterians back into Ulster.

For a less scholarly but entertaining view of the southern highland/Appalachian breed of Scots/Irish which Saturday Night Live loves to discriminate against ['Appalachian Hospital'] as well as the God-fearing intern on 30 Rock, read a book called The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad, a hell-raiser from the LA Basin who notes the influx of "Okies" into S. California chronicled by Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath during the Depression.

The Cousins' War by Philips remains a sourcebook of many historical antecedants of the well-described Four Folkways by Hackett-Fisher. For a good encomium about Albion's Seed as one of the most influential books on American history, read Max Boot's review in the NYT Nov. 2 Book Review of Hackett-Fisher's latest book, Champlain's Dream, which describes a bit of the Quebecois equivalent of the Four Folkways elaborated in AS.

*definition of racist = judging individuals by their race instead of of by more important attributes like intellect, policies, and experience.

"individual" would be better than "more important". Having got the definition clear, you can then argue whether it's the individual attributes or the racial ones which are more important, including the questions "more important to whom?", "more important for what purpose?" and so on. For the purpose of dodging death in Rwanda, or Nazi Germany, the racial attributes would have been more important.

I suspect that "Scotch-Irish" is much a "reverse PC" way of saying "rural white poor" (or "white trash")

Southeast Oklahoma is upland south. The Arbuckles are a drier spur of the Ozarks.

The rest of Oklahoma is much like New Mexico, except without the artsy crowd that came to Santa Fe, and also without (as many) Hispanics and Navajo. What Oklahoma does have are a lot of Alberta / Texas oil types, and Comanche. Oilmen in the private sector dislike socialists; Comanche respect warriors.

bioIgnoramus,

you're right; yours is a better definition.

Top of the mornin' to you, ben.

DavidB: As an Englishman who has not visited America and gets my impressions of American states mainly from films and TV, the word that comes immediately to my mind when these six states are mentioned is 'redneck'. Followed by 'banjo' and 'chainsaw'.

I think you need to stop reading too much into the movies.

Its almost as if they intended to make you think that your personal safety was more at risk in these states rather than say surrounded by the cheerful brown and black (and vibrant) denizens of many cities.

Im sure its unintentional....

A detailed symposium-discussion of Albion's Seed in the April 1991 William and Mary Quarterly here:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/i348326

Including response by Fischer. It's hard to tell how much of the critique is nit-picking vs. damaging.