Bones,
I don't know what country you live in, since members of the board come from all sorts of places ... but a really important book I think for Americans to read is "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America." David Fischer Hackett wrote it. The chapter most relevant to my own cultural history is the "Backcountry" section --- about the Scots-Irish in American (aka the "borderers" and "Ulster Scots in Britain). These people occupied the disputed lands between England and Scotland for centuries, and basically lived in a war zone, and developed a warrior culture. They shared no actual country, but instead shared an ethnicity. Some moved to Northern Ireland during the Scottish Clearances, and became known as the Ulster Scots ... and of course that land is still war-torn today. Many many many of them moved to the American colonies, and were the primary people that settled the frontier. Today, you can find these people throughout the South === the culture is least changed in Appalachia, but it really dominates the entire southern U.S. We are the "rednecks" and the "hillbillies." Hackett's book is important because he traces these people's childrearing ways, as well as other aspects of the culture. The warrior culture involved over-indulging small children, and encouraging willfulness and lack of self-control in older children, because these would be of use in an unstable environment where violence and a survival mentality was a daily fact of life. I have written in the margins of my copy of the book that this sounds like a recipe for narcissistic and borderline personalities.
If you are interested in doing "forensic personality autopsies" of ancestors, and you are American, I think you will find this book fascinating. It is thick, and somewhat expensive (although now you should be able to find a used copy somewhere).
