Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America | James Webb

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America | James Webb | Enjoyable Reading

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Born Fighting: How...

	Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America James Webb Broadway, 2005 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 144 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jim Webb

The newest senator from Virginia has outdone himself with this work. If you are the least interested in Irish or Scottish history, combined with history of the American South, this is the one book you must have. It explains so much of why we Southerners or how we are. You will find yourself buying copies of this book to give as gifts. Outstanding!

Enjoyable Reading

This is a book that you savour by slow reading. It is enjoyable histore particularly for a Scot or Irish man.

SuperTerrificWonderful

Webb does a phenomenal job weaving the various economic, political, and religious threads together to create a vivid tapestry depicting the origin and impact of the Scots-Irish. Well-written and riveting. My only criticism is that the author never acknowledged my request to have him autograph my copy (I even offered to deliver it to his office in D.C.!).

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Never bend a knee to Rome.

This was a well written and thought provoking book. I can see how some of the ideas put forward can be misconstrued do to the nature of the subjects but find myself agreeing with most of them. Mr. Webb has shed light on some very interesting topics. I am not a Scots-Irish historian so I enjoyed the history that this book offered. In the end this book has done a good service to one of the immigrant groups that built and fought for this great nation.

How the Rednecks Saved the World!

If James Webb's "Born Fighting" gets the reception it deserves, it will go a long way in exposing the first and apparently last socially acceptable prejudice in America: that against the working class southerner. Webb's book explodes the stereotypes attached to this people, demonstrating a depth of cultural character running much deeper than the traditional portrayals of them as stubbornly ignorant, lazy, beer guzzlers living in trailer parks.

Webb recounts the fascinating history of the Scots-Irish, beginning with the Scottish resistance to the Roman Empire itself, moving on to William Wallace and Robert the Bruce and the Scottish was for independence from the new Rome of England. He gives us the high drama of the creation of the distinctively Scots-Irish character when the English crown settled the first Scots in Ireland. With the Scots-Irish as their vanguard, the English were able to hold Ireland against other European powers (and, unfortunately, against the Irish themselves). England thanked the Scots-Irish by outlawing their Presbyterian religion in much the same way they had done the Catholicism of the Irish several years before. And so the Scots-Irish packed their bags and headed to America.

We should gain a newfound respect for these people from Webb's recouting of how they opened the American frontier, acting as a collective picket line against Indian attacks on the more settled English colonists in the coastal areas, and the important and unexpected roles they played in the southern Revolutionary War in the battles of King's Mountain and Cowpens.

Unfortunately, after the Revolutionary War, Webb's book loses a bit of its steam. Much of the drama and portraits of singular individuals we get in the earlier chapters gives way to talk of general social trends. Webb is still informative. Without for a moment excusing slavery or prejudice, Webb gives us an unexpected and perhaps uncomfortable view of just what problems the south had with the north, and how the southern working class was systematically oppressed by southern large land owners and northern merchants and industrial barons. Webb gives us surprising statistics on how much of our armed forces in the World Wars and Viet Nam were supplied by the Scots-Irish. And he reminds us that the closest thing we have to a national muscial genre -- country western -- is basically Scots-Irish music. Neverthess, the most interesting parts of "How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" end with America only on the verge of becoming a nation.

There are a few other problems too. While the old line WASP establishment and the new PC media establishment have both unjustifiably despised the Scots-Irish, Webb celebrates aspects of their character that have made them their own worst enemies time and again -- their "sensuality", their constant competitiveness in all athletics and all things physical, their hard drinking. The fact is that that sensuality has broken many hearts and busted many lives, the athleticism has led to alot of children to waste time and energy they could have spent on bettering their situation in life, and the drinking ... well, that speaks for itself. Also, the later chapters are chock full of stories from Webb's own ancestry. Fascintating characters in their own right to be sure, but the number of these stories comes close to making the second half of the book more of a James Webb memoir and less of a work on how an entire people shaped an entire nation. And toward the end of the book, Webb gets on a bit of a political rant that, though I agree with in many points, makes this book sound like the first step in his campaign for the Virginia Senate seat.

So "Born Fighting" is probably seen better as a corrective to WASP and PC prejudice against the Scots-Irish than as the final word on who the Scots-Irish are and what they should be. And a corrective is certainly needed. After reading "Born Fighting", it occurred to me that no one, as far as I can tell, has ever written at length specifically on the Scots-Irish as a distinct people -- no one, either to champion them or to cast WASP/PC aspersions on them. And where the Scots-Irish have gained scholarly or media attention, it has often been from pseudointellectuals such as H.L. Mencken (at whom Webb directs a few broadsides) bent on showing them in the worst light possible. One manifestation of this prejudice is that "Born Fighting" is bound to -- indeed it actually has now been -- characterized as racist. Such accusations are utter nonsense. One of Webb's heroes, in fact, is his own grandfather who suffered tremendously under white southern landowners for alerting the African Americans of his community to the inequities they were suffering at the landowners' hands. But in the minds of many these days, being fair-minded just isn't enough to escape the racist epithet.

"Born Fighting" doesn't quite deserve to be the last word on America's Scots-Irish. But it seems to be close to the first word, and a well-spoken one at that, on a people who have perhaps shaped the American character more than any other.

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