In the first volume of his cultural history of the United States, Fischer examines four seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-speaking immigrant groups.Puritans from "East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers . . . from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and . . . poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish {settled in the} . . . American backcountry.{Fischer argues that} these four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements."(Libr J)