Parts of this book, Scots-Irish history and culture and its impact on America, were fascinating and enlightening. Glorification of that culture and some of its champions like Andrew Jackson diminished my assessment of the book. ( )

History of the Scots-Irish in Scotland and Ireland and the migration to America. Includes his family history and overview of the Appalachia region in the 19th and 20th century. Goes into great detail about what makes up the Scots-Irish culture ( )

What a farrago of ethnocentrism, stereotyping, and special pleading this turned out to be! Well before this book was written, in 1962, James G. Leyburn in the foreword to his Scotch-Irish, much quoted by Webb, complained of

"... almost useless books of exaggerated praise or of sweeping criticism of a whole people. The Scotch-Irish have been written about as a "racial" group, as if their virtues and defects were inherent in their stock; they have been called the first typical American pioneers, the bulwark of the Revolution, the first radical element in American politics ... "

I read this as a follow-on to J. D. Vance's Hill Billy Elegy, and also because, among my five ethnic groups, is Scots-Irish. As the book progresses, Webb increasingly merges the history of the Scots-Irish with his family history, finally setting up the Webbs as the paradigm of the ethnic group. They would probably consider my own Scots-Irish grandfather, a genial, prosperous, concrete salesman who didn't hunt, didn't own a gun, and had no wood-lore, to be a total wuss, if not a traitor.

The book starts out fairly well with a discussion of the future Scotland as the part of Britain cut off by Hadrian's wall, after the Roman's decided it wasn't worth conquering. Inhabited by Picts and Celts, with the later additions of the Irish Scotti, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Anglo-Normans, in the Middle Ages it became an independent kingdom. Beginning in the 16th century, partly driven by population pressures, some of the by now largely Presbyterian inhabitants accepted the opportunity to migrate to Ireland. In the 18th century, they begin to migrate to the British-American colonies. Here, according to Webb, they form the backbone of the American Revolution, even if they are not the theoreticians. There is some possible caviling with this account, but let's move on.

Webb discusses the dispersion of the Scots-Irish in America. He tells us that some of them settled in Pennsylvania (like my forebears) and migrated westward across the northern United States; some made it to California. But those are not the people from whom he is descended, and we never hear about them again.

He praises Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the heavens, off-setting the Trail of Tears with the Jacksons's adoption of an Indian child. Not too equivalent, I think. Let's leave it that he had his good points, and his bad points, the latter of which Webb prefers to ignore. Apparently he is also the last wealthy Scots-Irishman that Webb is aware of. Hereafter, the story sticks to Appalachian mountaineers and poor Southern whites. One might think that "poor Southern White" and Scots-Irish are synonyms.

When Webb gets to the Civil War, the book really goes off the rails. Webb gets lost in the romance of the Lost Cause. Having earlier discussed the three classes of the South, placing the Scots-Irish in the middle of poor whites, he forgets this and plunges into the myth of the solidly unified South, fighting doggedly to the end. In fact, as recounted in William W. Freehling's The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War, many poor whites objected to the battle for secession as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," especially since rich men weren't subject to the draft, even without buying their way out like they did in the North. While happy to claim West Virginia as a major center of the Scots-Irish, he ignores the fact that the state exists because the mountaineers of western Virginia didn't want to secede from the Union. When I took a geneaology course, the teacher warned us that if we were anxious to trace our heroic Confederate ancestors, we would probably find that they had deserted before the end of the war.

The rest doesn't get any better. Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan are all the fault of the damnyankees, for which "red-necks" have been unfairly blamed. Someone once said that the tragedy of the South is that working-class whites didn't see that they had more in common in working-class Blacks than they had with elite whites. (Ditto for the rest of the country and the rest of the minorities.) Webb glimpses this very briefly, but manages to forget it almost immediately. To expand upon a point made by E. J. Dionne in his Why Americans Hate Politics, the working class tends to take the brunt of social change, and in this age of increasing income inequity they are floundering, and they need to avoid allowing their differences to overwhelm their common interests.

The Scots-Irish are unfairly excluded from Harvard; the fact that Asians and Jews are so successful at getting in is just part of the unfairness. He doesn't consider that they were (and in some eyes still are) despised minorities who worked hard to earn their qualifications and to be accepted on the basis of their qualifications. Unlike Vance, in Hill Billy Elegy he doesn't consider that his stereotyped Scots-Irish, who he describes as unintellectual, might need to consider cultural changes, and could take a lesson. He complains that preferences are given to Black Americans, ignoring that these are part of an attempt to overcome the exclusion of qualified African-Americans throughout history and our society, not an anti-poverty program per se. He talks about his father's heroic efforts to qualify for a degree while working and raising a family, but he can't quite seem to take a break from his ancestor worship to admit that if you don't want to live like your ancestors, you need be different from them, however admirable they may have been in their time. He might consider James Baldwin's warning: "People who imagine that history flatters them are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world."

I'm going to read James G. Leyburn's The Scotch-Irish and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed and hope for better. ( )

A wonderfully detailed history of the Scots-Irish people. I especially appreciated how Webb brought out aspects of the Scots-Irish history that tend to be overlooked, such as that as poor Southern whites, the Scots-Irish were just as badly off as Southern blacks. The only thing they had going for them was that they weren't black in an era of segregation. Then civil rights activists came in and alienated poor Southern whites by blaming them, along with more affluent whites, for the plight of the blacks. This naturally enraged the Scots-Irish and turned them from potential allies into bitter enemies of civil rights, because they were being tarred and feathered for oppression they had little to no part in. Even today people rarely discriminate between economic classes and simply blame all Southern whites for slavery and segregation. I really appreciated Webb's careful scholarship in bringing this and other historical discrepancies to light. ( )

I have a number of caveats about this book. It's more of a paean to the author's own culture than a true history, and as such, it presents some pretty sweeping generalizations. Some would challenge his readings of Scots-Irish and American history or even be offended by them. It might be, as I've seen in other reviews, that Webb's narrative is "self-indulgent" or a "mythologizing" of Scots-Irish and Southern cultures.

But for all that, I truly enjoyed reading it. Even though my forebears settled farther North than most of Webb's subjects, I saw traces of my own family throughout. And I definitely appreciated his passionate effort to help readers see the heart of a culture that too few try to understand or respect. For that reason alone, I found it a highly worthwhile read. I learned a lot. ( )