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A Dance Called America

A Dance Called America

£9.99

A Dance Called America—The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada

The epic story of Highland emigration to the New World


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About the Ebook

A dance was devised in eighteenth-century Skye. An exhilarating dance. A dance, a visitor reports, 'the emigration from Skye has occasioned'. The visitor asks for the dance's name. 'They call it America,' he's told.

In his introduction to this new edition of his classic and pioneering account of what happened to the thousands of people who left Skye and the wider north of Scotland to make new lives across the sea, historian James Hunter reflects on what led him to embark on travels and researches that took him across a continent.

To Georgia, North Carolina and Montana; to Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and the Mohawk Valley; to prairie farms and great cities; to the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia and Washington State. This is the story of the Highland impact on the New World. The story of how soldiers, explorers, guerrilla fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks, railway builders and settlers from Scotland's glens and islands contributed so much to the USA and Canada. It is the story of how a hard-pressed people found in North America a land of opportunity.


Why You'll Love This Ebook

  • Trace the journeys of Highlanders who crossed the Atlantic
  • Discover how Scots shaped the United States and Canada
  • Explore emigration's painful causes and remarkable legacies
  • Read another celebrated title from Birlinn Ltd - Independent Scottish Publisher

About the Author

James Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He has written extensively about the north of Scotland and about the region's worldwide diaspora. In the course of a varied career Hunter has been, among other things, director of the Scottish Crofters Union, chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise and an award-winning journalist. His book Set Adrift upon the World (Birlinn 2016) was Saltire History Book of the Year in 2016.

Publication Details

Publisher: Birlinn Ltd

Publication Date: 05 May 2022

Print Length: 288 pages (Ebook edition)

ISBN (Ebook): 9780857907752

Format: Ebook


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