How the Scots Made America
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Ever since they first set foot in the new world alongside the Viking explorers, the Scots have left their mark. In this entertaining and informative book, historian Michael Fry shows how Americans of Scottish heritage helped shape this country, from its founding days to the present. They were courageous pioneers, history-changing revolutionaries, great Presidents, doughty fighters, inspiring writers, learned teachers, intrepid explorers, daring frontiersmen, and of course buccaneering businessmen, media moguls, and capitalists throughout American history.
The Scots' unflappable spirit and hardy disposition helped them take root among the earliest settlements and become some of the British colonies' foremost traders. During the Revolution, the teachings of the great Scottish philosophers and economists would help to shape the democracy that thrived in America as in no other part of the world. America may have separated from the British Empire, but the Scottish influence on the young continent never left.
Armed with an inimitable range of historical knowledge, Fry charts the exchange of ideas and values between Scotland and America that led to many of the greatest achievements in business, science, and the arts. Finally, he takes readers into the twentieth century, in which the Scots serve as the ideal example of a people that have embraced globalization without losing their sense of history, culture and national identity.
Scottish Americans have been incomparable innovators in every branch of American society, and their fascinating story is brilliantly captured in this new book by one of Scotland's leading historians. How the Scots Made America is not only a must-read for all those with Scottish ancestry but for anyone interested in knowing the full story behind the roots of the American way of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although his title makes a claim that he fails to fully back up, Fry, a correspondent for the Scotsman and author of The Scottish Empire, provides a highly entertaining romp through American history as influenced by men and women of Scottish ancestry, from warriors to financiers, from politicians to explorers. Fry wanders pleasurably and eloquently across a landscape including presidents Polk, Buchanan, Arthur and Wilson, and William McIntosh, son of a Scottish trader and a Native-American princess who became chief of the Creek Indians and introduced tartan to their costumes. Davy Crockett, Malcolm Forbes and the first two men to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, also figure here. Fry gives due diligence to the likes of Herman Melville, Douglas MacArthur, the New York Times's James "Scotty" Reston (born in Scotland and brought to the U.S. as a child), New York Herald founder James Gordon Bennett and such movie stars as Shirley MacLaine, Stewart Granger, George C. Scott and Katharine Hepburn. One small complaint about this generally inclusive work: in his chapter on capitalists, Fry appropriately gives in-depth coverage to Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie, but he completely ignores Jay Gould, an equally major American financial giant with a significant Scottish pedigree. Tamer in tone than James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Forecasts, Sept. 12), this contributes nicely to the recent revival of interest in Scottish influence around the world.
