Book description
A new dance is devised on the Isle of Skye in the eighteenth century.
An exhilarating dance. A dance, one visitor reports, that 'the
emigration from Skye has occasioned'. The visitor asks for the dance's
name. 'They call it America,' he is told.
Now James Hunter, one of Scotland's leading historians, provides the
first comprehensive account of what happened to the thousands of
people who, over the last 300 years, left Skye and other parts of the
Scottish Highlands to make new lives in the United States and Canada.
The product both of painstaking research and extensive travels in
North America, this is the definitive story of the Highland impact on
the New World, the story of how soldiers, explorers, guerrilla
fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks and pioneer settlers from the north
of Scotland found, on the other side of the Atlantic, freedoms and
opportunities denied to them at home.
James Hunter is the author of a number of books on Scottish history,
including
Culloden and the Last Clansman
,
Scottish Exodus
and
Skye: The Island
. He lives in Beauly, Inverness-shire.
