A Dance Called America

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.