His recruits – about 20,000 people in total – were Quakers from the north of England, many of them minor merchants and traders. They disproportionately included the Britons of Norse descent common in that region, who formed a separate stratum and had never really gotten along with the rest of the British population. They were joined by several German sects close enough to Quakers that they felt at home there; these became the ancestors of (among other groups) the Pennsylvania Dutch, Amish, and Mennonites.

Rank Ways: "The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks." John Adams’ male line name came from the village of Braintree in England, which is east of the U. of Cambridge. Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, north of and in-between Cambridge and Oxford, closer to Cambridge. Rodger Cunningham: "[I]t was primarily a matter of violence done to the ancestors of Appalachians and not, as it naturally appeared from the other side, one of violence being perpetrated by them. And of course this has continued for eight centuries in the same terms ... the omission of these facts has serious consequences for Fischer's concept of 'violence' ..."Then there are some other clusters: the amish, mormons, appalachians, who seem to have high admixture but remain distinct (?). Virginia didn’t really have towns; the Chesapeake Bay was such a giant maze of rivers and estuaries and waterways that there wasn’t much need for land transport hubs. Instead, the unit of settlement was the plantation, which consisted of an aristocratic planter, his wife and family, his servants, his slaves, and a bunch of guests who hung around and mooched off him in accordance with the ancient custom of hospitality. And I guess we still haven’t ruled out the maximally boring explanation that interbreeding is entirely geographic and north-south is a bigger distinction than east-west so we’re just seeing the country divided into five equal-sized latitudinal bands.)

The Quaker political philosophy was good governance, liberty, and peace. Politics, in their view, was “an element of religion itself, a thing holy in its institution and its goal.” These religious precepts’ political significance, however, was up for debate. On matters of public concern, Quakers fought vehemently amongst themselves. According to the text, Pennsylvania was the colony where the notion of small government spread the furthest. With the spectacular rebirth of freedom around the world and the decline of the nuclear danger, many of my younger students are returning to the classical problems of American history with a more optimistic and even whiggish teleology that sees history as a process of progressive change.So it would seem that Smith was originally an Irish Indentured servant to someone called Smith, or his original Irish name had been McGowan (where Gowan is the anglicization of the Gaelic word for Smith) and it was rendered Smith. Their conception of liberty has also survived and shaped modern American politics: it seems essentially to be the modern libertarian/Republican version of freedom from government interference, especially if phrased as “get the hell off my land”, and especially especially if phrased that way through clenched teeth while pointing a shotgun at the offending party.