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Scotland: A History

Scotland: A History is the most recent publication seeking to cover the history of Scotland during the last 2000 years

Scotland: A History
Jenny Wormald (Ed)
Oxford University Press 2005
ISBN-10: 0198206151
ISBN-13: 978-0198206156

ABSTRACT:

Scotland: A History - CoverThe romantic tales of Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Mary Queen of Scots, and Bonnie Prince Charlie have long dominated Scottish history. But the explosion of serious historical research in the last half-century has fuelled a keen desire for a better-informed and more satisfying understanding of the Scottish past.

This attractively designed book brings together the leading authorities on Scottish history, which range from Roman times until the present day, offering an accurate and sophisticated portrait of Scotland through the ages. The contributors take us from Medieval Scotland, to the crisis created by Mary Queen of Scots and the trauma of Reformation, to the reign of James VI and the Union of the Crowns (1603). They discuss the seventeenth century, when a stern Calvinist Kirk launched an unprecedented attack on music, dancing, drama, and drinking, and the remarkable transformation of enlightenment Scotland, when the small nation became a great force in European literature, with such eminent figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and James Boswell. We discover that in the nineteenth century the Scottish economy, by some criteria, outpaced the rest of Britain, and its pre-eminence in heavy engineering was unquestioned. And we follow Scotland through the turbulent twentieth century, enduring two world wars and a depression, before ending on a high note, with Scotland enjoying its first parliament in three hundred years.

What emerges is a portrait of a confident people, who slowly built an important place for themselves in the wider world: the story of a remarkably positive, assured, and successful kingdom.

CONTENTS:

Introduction

1: Katherine Forsyth: Origins: Scotland to 1100

2: Keith Stringer: The Emergence of a Nation-State, 1100-1300

3: Michael Brown and Steve Boardman: Survival and Revival: Late Medieval Scotland

4: Roger Mason: Renaissance and Reformation: The Sixteenth Century

5: Jenny Wormald: Confidence and Perplexity: The Seventeenth Century

6: Richard B. Sher: Scotland Transformed: The Eighteenth Century

7: I. G. C. Hutchison: Workshop of Empire: The Nineteenth Century

8: Richard Finlay: The Turbulent Century: Scotland since 1900

9: David Armitage: The Scottish Diaspora

10: Sally Mapstone: Scotland’s Stories

Further Reading

Chronology

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Edited by Jenny Wormald, Honorary Fellow, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh

Jenny Wormald is an Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and was previously Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous publications on early modern Scottish and British history and is the editor of the seventeenth century volume in the Short Oxford History of the British Isles series.

Contributors:
David Armitage, Harvard University
Stephen Boardman, University of Edinburgh
Michael Brown, University of St Andrews
Richard Finlay, University of Strathclyde
Katherine Forsyth, University of Glasgow
I. G. C. Hutchinson, University of Stirling
Sally Mapstone, University of Oxford
Roger Mason, University of St Andrews
Richard B. Sher, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Keith J. Stringer, University of Lancaster
Jenny Wormald, University of Edinburgh

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