Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America - Historical Book on Scottish-Irish Immigration & Cultural Influence | Perfect for History Buffs & Ancestry Research
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Product Description
More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself. Born Fighting is the first book to chronicle the full journey of this remarkable cultural group, and the profound, but unrecognized, role it has played in the shaping of America. Written with the storytelling verve that has earned his works such acclaim as “captivating . . . unforgettable” (the Wall Street Journal on Lost Soliders), Scots-Irishman James Webb, Vietnam combat veteran and former Naval Secretary, traces the history of his people, beginning nearly two thousand years ago at Hadrian’s Wall, when the nation of Scotland was formed north of the Wall through armed conflict in contrast to England’s formation to the south through commerce and trade. Webb recounts the Scots’ odyssey—their clashes with the English in Scotland and then in Ulster, their retreat from one war-ravaged land to another. Through engrossing chronicles of the challenges the Scots-Irish faced, Webb vividly portrays how they developed the qualities that helped settle the American frontier and define the American character. Born Fighting shows that the Scots-Irish were 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army; they included the pioneers Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston; they were the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and they have given America numerous great military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Audie Murphy, and George S. Patton, as well as most of the soldiers of the Confederacy (only 5 percent of whom owned slaves, and who fought against what they viewed as an invading army). It illustrates how the Scots-Irish redefined American politics, creating the populist movement and giving the country a dozen presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. And it explores how the Scots-Irish culture of isolation, hard luck, stubbornness, and mistrust of the nation’s elite formed and still dominates blue-collar America, the military services, the Bible Belt, and country music. Both a distinguished work of cultural history and a human drama that speaks straight to the heart of contemporary America, Born Fighting reintroduces America to its most powerful, patriotic, and individualistic cultural group—one too often ignored or taken for granted.
Customer Reviews
The Scots-Irish, perhaps the least assimilated of the Insular Celts of prehistory, remain a people apart. They have cultural similarities to other insular peoples such as the Kurds, the Karen and the !Kung people. But they are "our" people apart, not those of some faraway part of the world.Born Fighting is an expansion of Webb's lifetime collected observations as to how and why the American Scots-Irish came into being, as well as how they have shaped and continue to shape both American and world civilization. It is highly appreciated, since the usual political, academic and cultural expostulations are easily seen by anyone with Appalachian background as being contrived at best but generally nonsense.Webb divides his book into seven parts, with the first and last being an introduction and a reflective analysis. Parts two through six give the history of the early Scots people, the Ulster Scots, the place of the people in the American Revolution, the Old South and the Confederacy, and the second diaspora. He provides an historical context and explanation how it is that this culture of hardship and poverty continues to provide America with the its unseen core of adaptive skill and energy.He makes a point several times that the Scots-Irish are an inclusive, hybridized people. He points out that the Scots-Irish American culture has assimilated individual members of its historical enemies such as the Borders people, Irish, Germans, Africans, and others who have married into or moved into its communities. Acceptance of worthy outsiders remains one of the strong traditions but cultural testing occurs when the outsider is called upon to live up to the basic values of loyalty, independence, and bravery in hardship.This book was a revelation, one of the few that I've read which starts to make the psyche of the Scots-Irish people understandable in both psychological and historical context. But it is not the ending of Scots-Irish cultural studies and I look forward to more of the same genre.The (reprinted in the Amazon product description) Publisher's Weekly review demonstrates that Scots-Irish culture remains beyond the grasp of some readers, even professional reviewers. That particular reviewer's shallow and false analysis seems to be presented only to touch all the politically correct bases but it also aptly illustrates the author's point that the Scots-Irish story "...has been lost under the weight of more recent immigrations, revisionist historians, and common ignorance." The reader who is appreciative of Scots-Irish wit may wish to revisit this review once they have read Webb's discussion of the cultural/ethnocentric bigotry he discusses as having occurred during his time as a student at Georgetown Law. The reader will find the review uproariously funny once they are 'inside' the joke. (A brief discussion of his experience at Georgetown is found in part seven of the book in the chapter entitled "The Invisible People".)This book is liberally seeded with footnotes, references and quotations from important historical figures and historians and gives sufficient citations for further study by the reader. These citations are themselves worth the price of the book. The only lack I can see is that since it was published in 2004, it entirely predates the major career of the most recent and arguably the most populist of US Scots-Irish presidents, Barack Obama. So when it is revised and updated for a second edition I do hope that Webb presents a good analysis of this important historical figure.(Edited to add the note that readers who want to delve further into the past, to find out the roots of how the Scots began to settle in Ireland might find it helpful to look up the word Gallowglass or Galloglass, to read about the medieval Scots mercenaries of Ireland. Significant numbers later Scot-Irish were members of or married into the old Gallowglass families.)
