Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer, who in Albion's Seed argued that four initial waves of English Protestant migration were of primary importance to the present-day United States, and that these settlers' Anglo-Saxon values gave the nation its indelible character, reports that the book was not always so well received when it was published in 1989, as academic enthusiasm for multiculturalism and political correctness crested. Crudely worded death threats arrived by mail, always postmarked anonymously from university towns. One of the death threats contained footnotes. The FBI and the Postal Inspector said they had never seen a death threat with footnotes before.

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