Hi, a long time ago I wrote a post for /r/badhistory about Albion's Seed. Below, I will revise my old post slightly to better reflect my feelings about the book. I am a humanities PhD but not a specialist in early America.

I believe the book is overall worth skimming but you should take it with a grain of salt. Three of the four sections are fairly interesting.

Much of the Puritan section is based on a small selection of 19th century reminisces, rather than contemporary sources. It's helpful to read the Puritan section alongside The New England Mind by Perry Miller, which makes far superior use of primary sources from the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as alongside Fischer's own primary source which he subjected to cherry picking; I will mention this at the bottom of this post.

There are various little bits of folk etymology and urban legend scattered throughout the book; sometimes if you look something up on Google, you will find that it is not true. In the Puritan and Cavalier sections this isn't all that bad, but the Quaker section is a bit dubious, and the Appalachian section betrays a rather dark undercurrent, which was recognized by academics when the book was first published.

Specifically, part of the mission of Albion's Seed is to revive the "Teutonic germ theory" of pre-WW2 historiography, which states that America achieved power and liberty based on unique English cultural achievements, rather than geographic or social advantages (for example, slavery).

The place in which we may see Fischer reviving the Teutonic germ myth is chiefly in the section on "Borderers". Fischer's book is called Albion's Seed for a reason: he wishes to reinforce that America's ruling class came not from various peoples from the British Isles, or Europe, or other parts of the world, but specifically from the English first and foremost. Some of the early colonists of the rural South and Appalachia were not English -- they are often called Scots-Irish -- so they serve as his chief counterexample and outgroup. He calls the Appalachian settlers "Borderers" regardless of their actual place of origin. One of Fischer's sources claims that "the whole of Scotland can be considered a Border region" of England, ignoring Scotland's centrality to the development of liberalism, science, and nationalism.

Fischer creates a Frankenstein's monster of "Borderers" out of bits and pieces of anecdote of specific events from the 18th to 20th centuries, mostly getting his methodology and analysis directly from pre-1920 sources, and ignoring most research contemporary to his own publication. His section on "Borderers" is meant to create an image of a race of uncivilized whites who are habitually violent, chaotic, stupid, and resist attempts by others to "civilize" them, when in fact the Scots-Irish often sought integration, while rural, poor Appalachianers were more often the victims of violence from these supposedly civilized groups. While Albion's Seed was initially hailed in popular and academic reviews, when people looked closer as I did, they began to see that the "Borderers" section is one big fib.

Here's how academics responded to Fischer at the time (“Culture Wars: David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed.” Appalachian Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 1992, pp. 161–200):

Edward J. Cowan: "It is just not acceptable to pretend that areas as diverse as the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, Ireland, Lowland Scotland, the border country and the north of England shared some kind of cultural homogeneity. ... he presents the equivalent of a potted history of the United States in which he might highlight only presidential assassinations and the crime figures from New York."

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' ..."

For reasons of space I will not quote the entire argument made by Altina Waller in her talk, but she very persuasively argues that social position (what would be called "class" in the 19th century) was more important than geographic heritage in determining cultural mores, and makes the supposedly huge distinctions between these four groups of Britishers quite dubious compared to their commonalities. She expresses some sympathy for Fischer's attempted project but sharply rejects his concept of "Borderers."

Fischer was given space for a reply to these critiques. He chose to conflate the scholars he was responding to with anonymous threats sent to him by mail, and characterized his critics as aged hippies who hadn't gotten over the Vietnam War and couldn't see that the Puritan/Quaker/Cavalier gift of freedom was now blossoming throughout the world of 1992 (by "the world", one might stress, he means the former Soviet Union, and by "freedom" he means some very structural thing the "Borderers" were never able to provide, but had to have supplied to them). Here's a direct quote from him:

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.

The following issue of this journal contains an article by Michael Ellis, "On the Use of Dialect as Evidence: "Albion's Seed" in Appalachia," which presents a greater amount of damning detail, as follows:

How Fischer arrived at his generalization [about the existence of a "family of dialects" called "Appalachian"] based on [his cited] sources is confusing ... the manner in which Fischer arrives at this conclusion is questionable.

[M]ore disturbing are instances where Fischer misrepresents a source in order to imply an empirical basis for a subjective generalization. For example, Fischer claims that:

This was an earthy dialect. The taboos of Puritan English had little impact on Southern highland speech until the twentieth century. Sexual processes and natural functions were freely used in figurative expressions. Small children, for example, were fondly called little shits" as a term of endearment. A backcountry granny would say kindly to a little child, "Ain't you a cute little shit." (p. 653)

[But Fischer's cited source] goes on to argue that in regards to sexual teminology, the mountain folk were considerably more inhibited, employing, for example, various euphemisms to avoid the words bull and stallion. Fischer, however, ignores this information since it does not support his assertion that "Sexual talk was free and easy in the backcountry" (p. 680).

Furthermore, Fischer was not simply skimming his source; he was actively discarding counterevidence. For the more eye-popping parts of his entertaining Puritan section, Fischer relies heavily on a very interesting book, Oldtown Folks by Harriet Beecher Stowe (yes, that Harriet Beecher Stowe). However, if you pick up this book for yourself -- and I recommend that you do -- you will find that it portrays a vibrant "common folk" in New England who more closely resemble Fischer's uninhibited, taboo-free "backcountry" than they do his stuffy, moralistic Puritans. Fischer threw out a whole lot of fun stuff from his own principal source in order to contrast the Puritans with a fictitious group of "Borderers" and make the "Borderers" unique in their cultural backwardness.