Americans invented the rocking chair so that they could keep moving even when they were sitting still.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 6, 2005.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer explains factors that influence markers of culture. Using early American immigrants as a case study, he discusses the utility of speech patterns in charting their migration patterns. Variations of English dialects spoken in America create a valuable parallel to these settlers’ widely varying views regarding marriage traditions, schooling, family structure, and even liberty and freedom.
Fischer illuminates these issues by considering African immigrants to the American colonies. Masters had vastly differing perceptions of their trade, from the Quakers’ early view of slaves as permanent indentured servants, to the Virginian attempt to bind their human chattel to the land, equating them with real estate. He explains that the more we study issues such as the variations in colonial African-American immigrants’ proportion to the general population, regional origins in Africa, and masters’ cultural differences, the better we can understand how their speech and other cultural markers changed in the New World.
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