Scottish Nationalism Before 1789: an Ideology, A Sentiment, Or a Creation‪?‬

********** At the University of St. Andrews in the early 1990s, students (including myself) used to ring the telephone of the Scottish National party in order to demonstrate our support and to hear the voice of Sean Connery on the answer phone. Several years later, in 1995, Mel Gibson's Braveheart appeared in movie theaters across the globe, offering an inaccurate view of history while providing an excellent demonstration of the strength of Scottish nationalism in the late twentieth century. In 2001, that nationalist sentiment swept across the country, finding a political outlet when almost seventy-five percent of Scots voted in favor of re-establishing a Scottish Parliament for the first time since the union of the crowns (1707). Scottish nationalist sentiment remains strong in the first years of the twenty-first century. Books such as Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) have worked to establish a global significance for the relatively small land in the northern part of the Isle of Great Britain. (2)