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.

Celeste Ray is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South and editor of Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism.