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

Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1994. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 288 pages. Illustrations (color). Names Personal and Otherwise. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. James Hunter's many involvements in the life of the Highlands and Islands have established him as a leading authority on this most beautiful part of Scotland. He was the founding director of the Scottish Crofters Union, a vice-chairman of the North West Regional Board of Scottish Natural Heritage, and director of Barail, the Centre for Highlands and Islands Policy Studies. He is a journalist, broadcaster, historian, and award-winning writer. This work is the fulfillment of a long-held ambition to discover what happened to the innumerable Highlanders who settled in the United States and Canada. A new dance was devised in the Isle of Skye in the eighteenth century. An exhilarating dance. A dance, one visitor reports, which ''the emigration from Skye has occasioned''. The visitor asks for the dance's name. ''They call it America,'' he is told. Now James Hunter provides the first comprehensive account of what happened to the thousands of people who, over the last two hundred years, left Skye and other parts of the Scottish Highlands to make new lives in the United States and Canada. His travels and researches took him across North America. This is the definitive story of the Highland impact on the New World. The story of how soldiers, explorers, guerilla fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks, railway builders and pioneer settlers from the northern part of Scotland contributed so much to the United States and Canada. The story of how an oppressed people found in North American a land of liberation.