IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

Fischer argues that these different folkways have influenced American life for centuries. For instance, the Appalachian region has long resisted centralized federal control, while New England has often shown more technocratic sympathies. Moreover, these folkways have spread far from the original settlements. For instance, though he spent much of his youth in Hawaii, Barack Obama has many affinities with a Puritan mode of politics (infused with moralizing and managerial sentiments). And he can likely trace his maternal family lineage to the Dunham family, which settled in northern Massachusetts in the 1630s.

As Fischer acknowledges, waves of other immigrants have also influenced American culture, and these four folkways do not give a perfectly comprehensive picture of American life. But they have been influential, and they provide a lens for thinking about the different textures of freedom in the United States and beyond.

According to Fischer, each folkway cluster had a characteristic approach to freedom (what he calls "freedom ways"). The Puritans emphasized ordered liberty and moral duty as part of freedom. In his "Little Speech on Liberty," early Massachusetts governor John Winthrop argued that "civil or federal" liberty may "also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves." For the Puritans, liberty meant the rule of a just authority.

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