THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PERFECT FOR FANS OF OUTLANDER The true story of one of Scotland’s most notorious and romantic heroes.

An enlightening illustrated overview of Gaelic culture and history in Scotland. Words have always held great power in the Gaelic traditions of the Scottish Highlands: Bardic poems bought immortality for their subjects; satires threatened to ruin reputations and cause physical injury; clan sagas recounted family origins and struggles for power; incantations invoked blessings and curses. Even in the present, Gaels strive to counteract centuries of misrepresentation of the Highlands as a backwater of barbarism without a valid story of its own to tell. Warriors of the Word offers a broad overview of Scottish Highland culture and history, bringing together rare and previously untranslated primary texts from scattered and obscure sources. Poetry, songs, tales, and proverbs, supplemented by the accounts of insiders and travelers, illuminate traditional ways of life, exploring such topics as folklore, music, dance, literature, social organization, supernatural beliefs, human ecology, ethnic identity, and the role of language. This range of materials allows Scottish Gaeldom to be described on its own terms and to demonstrate its vitality and wealth of renewable cultural resources—making this an essential compendium for scholars, students, and all enthusiasts of Scottish culture.

The Highlands of Scotland, and more specifically the clans that inhabit them, have a romantic resonance and mystery. Fitzroy Maclean recounts their extraordinary history, from their Celtic origins to Robert the Bruce, the wars of independence and Bannockburn, from Flodden, Mary Queen of Scots to the Jacobite Risings of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth-century Clearances and the modern day. Highlanders sheds light on the motivation and character of the clans, bringing vividly to life their highly dramatic stories. Never before has there been such a thorough and well-balanced view of Highland history.

Between 1735 and 1748 hundreds of young men and their families emigrated from the Scottish Highlands to the Georgia coast to settle and protect the new British colony. These men were recruited by the trustees of the colony and military governor James Oglethorpe, who wanted settlers who were accustomed to hardship, militant in nature, and willing to become frontier farmer-soldiers. In this respect, the Highlanders fit the bill perfectly through training and tradition. Recruiting and settling the Scottish Highlanders as the first line of defense on the southern frontier in Georgia was an important decision on the part of the trustees and crucial for the survival of the colony, but this portion of Georgia's history has been sadly neglected until now. By focusing on the Scots themselves, Anthony W. Parker explains what factors motivated the Highlanders to leave their native glens of Scotland for the pine barrens of Georgia and attempts to account for the reasons their cultural distinctiveness and "old world" experience aptly prepared them to play a vital role in the survival of Georgia in this early and precarious moment in its history.

A comparative approach to the American Indians and Scottish Highlanders, this book examines the experiences of clans and tribal societies, which underwent parallel experiences on the peripheries of Britain's empire in Britain, the United States, and Canada.

Meyer addresses himself principally to two questions. Why did many thousands of Scottish Highlanders emigrate to America in the eighteenth century, and why did the majority of them rally to the defense of the Crown. . . . Offers the most complete and intelligent analysis of them that has so far appeared.--William and Mary Quarterly Using a variety of original sources -- official papers, travel documents, diaries, and newspapers -- Duane Meyer presents an impressively complete reconstruction of the settlement of the Highlanders in North Carolina. He examines their motives for migration, their life in America, and their curious political allegiance to George III.

A history of the isles and glens of the Highlands of Scotland. Starting from a journey north to the author's home in the Western Isles, this book is a tour of the past, great and sad, of the Gaels of Scotland, and through the realities of the present.