Oh, yeah--I've read Albion's Seed. Fischer's treatment of the early Middle Atlantic states actually chimed with things I grew up hearing about my mom's family: they included Quakers who settled in Delaware Valley in the late 1600s. I think that Fischer somewhere remarks on how the Quakers' inclusive social policy led directly to the culture's disappearance--inundated in waves of later German, Irish, etc. migrants among whom they persisted as a tiny, marginal minority. So, whereas New England congregationalism and the Tidewater branch of the anglican church survived as social forces into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, the Friends rather rapidly declined from stalwarts of local government & culture to virtual political & cultural invisibility. Believe me, that's the way they remember it ...