Born Fighting

Webb’s history of the Scots-Irish — the Lowland Scots who were settled in Ulster and then emigrated in large numbers to the American backcountry in the eighteenth century — and his argument that their culture supplied a durable American strain: individualist, clannish, suspicious of central authority, and heavily over-represented in the country’s military. He runs it from the border wars through Ulster and Appalachia to the present, with his own family’s history woven through.

It is a work of advocacy as much as history, written by a former Marine officer, Secretary of the Navy and later United States senator, and historians have criticised the thesis for treating a large and mixed migration as a single continuous folk culture. Read it as a strong argument about American identity rather than a settled account.

Context: The list pairs it with Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World, already in Kyle’s anti-library — the same population, one book on what they did in Scotland and one on what they did in America.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• James Webb — the author; Marine officer, Navy Secretary, senator, novelist.
• How the Scots Invented the Modern World — Herman’s book on the same people in Scotland, also on this list and already carded.
• Founding Fathers — the backcountry population the Revolution drew on, on Webb’s account.
• Institutions — or the distrust of them, which is the cultural trait he is tracking.
• History — popular ethnic history and its risks.