Transatlantic Scots

Examines the impact of the Scottish legacy on North American cultures and heritage

During the past four decades, growing interest in North Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new Scottish clan and heritage societies. Well over 300 Scottish Highland games and gatherings annually take place across the U.S. and Canada.

Transatlantic Scots is a multidisciplinary collection that studies the regional organization and varied expressions of the Scottish Heritage movement in the Canadian Maritimes, the Great Lakes, New England, and the American South. From diverse perspectives, authorities in their fields consider the modeling of a Scottish identity that distances heritage celebrants from prevalent visions of whiteness. Considering both hyphenated Scots who celebrate centuries-old transmission of Scottish traditions and those for whom claiming or re-claiming a Scottish identity is recent and voluntary, this book also examines how diaspora themes and Highland imagery repeatedly surface in regional public celebrations and how traditions are continually reinvented through the accumulation of myths. The underlying theoretical message is that ethnicity and heritage survive because of the flexibility of history and tradition.

This work is a lasting contribution to the study of ethnicity and identity, the renegotiation of history and cultural memory into heritage, and the public performance and creation of tradition.

Transatlantic Scots and ethnicity / Celeste Ray -- Scottish immigration and ethnic organization in the United States / Celeste Ray -- A brief history of organized Scottishness in Canada / Michael Vance -- From the Quebec-Hebrideans to "les écossais-québécois" : tracing the evolution of a Scottish cultural identity in Canada's eastern townships / Margaret Bennett -- Powerful pathos : the triumph of Scottishness in Nova Scotia / Michael Vance -- You play it as you would sing it : Cape Breton, Scottishness, and the means of cultural production / Jonathan Dembling -- The North American émigré, highland games, and social capital in international communities / Grant Jarvie -- Troubling times in the Scottish-American relationship / Andrew Hook -- Bravehearts and patriarchs : masculinity on the pedestal in southern Scottish heritage celebration / Celeste Ray -- Finding Colonsay's emigrants and a "heritage of place" / John W. Sheets -- Pilgrims to the far country : North American "roots-tourists" in the Scottish highlands and islands / Paul Basu -- Tartan day in America / Edward J. Cowan -- Transatlantic Scots, their interlocutors, and the Scottish discursive unconscious / Colin McArthur.