Fischer's book may have it share of cliches, but the opening paragraph of this review has some, too - Americans' bias against the French and boredom with Canada, for instance. And I don't know about today's schools, but I certainly heard enough when I was in grade school about Champlain and Montcalm and the Plains of Abraham and Marquette and Joliet, etc.
In my opinion, Fischer's best book is one of his least known: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Without directly addressing the topic, the book does a better job of explaining the source of differences between "red states" and "blue states" than does any modern political book-of-the-month. And that's the least of its marvels. Traveling through the eastern U.S. after reading the book is an entirely new experience, in which seemingly random differences in architecture, speech, behavior, etc. suddenly reveal themselves as bits of an intricate pattern
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