Journey from the Isle of Skye to the Deep South, to the Rockies and beyond.

A dance was devised in eighteenth-century Skye. An exhilarating dance. A dance, a visitor reports, 'the emigration from Skye has occasioned'. The visitor asks for the dance's name. 'They call it America,' he's told.

Over a period of three centuries, many thousands of people left the islands and wider north of Scotland to make new lives across the sea. In this new edition of his acclaimed book, historian James Hunter follows in their footsteps – from the Deep South to the Rockies and beyond – to tell the story of the Highland impact on the New World.

In doing so, he reveals how soldiers, explorers, guerrilla fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks, railways builders and settlers from Scotland's glens and islands contributed much to the USA and Canada. It is the story of how a hard-pressed people found in North America a land of opportunity.

In this edition features a new introduction from James Hunter, where he reflects on what led him to embark on travels and researches that took him across a continent.



James Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He has written extensively about the north of Scotland and about the region's worldwide diaspora. In the course of a varied career Hunter has been, among other things, director of the Scottish Crofters Union, chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise and an award-winning journalist. His book Set Adrift upon the World (Birlinn 2016) was Saltire History Book of the Year in 2016.