Born Fighting

Name: Born Fighting
Rating: 4.5 (1139 reviews)

by James H. Webb

First published 2004

Amazon

4.5(1,139)

James Webb traces the Scots-Irish story from the violent borderlands of Britain through the Plantation of Ulster and the great eighteenth-century migration to the American backcountry. He follows the development of a culture shaped by clan loyalty, religious conviction, hostility to aristocratic authority and long experience of frontier warfare, then examines how those traditions travelled into Appalachia and the expanding United States.

Moving through the American Revolution, westward settlement, the Civil War, military service and populist politics, Webb argues that Scots-Irish values became a powerful strand in American public life. Part cultural history and part family meditation, Born Fighting connects migration and memory with the lives of figures such as William Wallace and Andrew Jackson while asking how an often loosely defined community helped shape ideas of independence, honour and social equality.