To be fair to Fischer, I should describe the book. It's a thick book, full of data. It describes what he calls the four major migrations from Britain to North America: East Anglia to Mass.;South of England to Virginia; North Midlands to Delaware; Borderlands to the Backcountry.

He has tons of data linking many cultural areas. However, he is purposing to do a cultural history. This leads to the great debate between anecdotalists and empiricists. It is this effort that is his major contribution to the study of history. He is trying to give a historical value to the story handed down from your great-great granparents (on another thread, there is somebody wearing his ?-grandfather's uniform and building a new history with a sword). Historians have to be able to work that out and they haven't really done it.

The other three areas are better done. Fischer describes smaller areas in Britain that move to specific areas in the New World in tighter time frames. The area that we are all interested in is his weakest, in the empirical sense, for the reasons discussed earlier.

It is still very good reading and recommended to those who would like to know more about the Scots and the Irish in the time frame discussed. It is probably one of the easiest to read histories that cover this subject. It is more anecdotal and general but that's what he is trying to do.