The Gaelic And Indian Origins Of The American Revolution

How did an unlikely group of peoples--Irish-speaking Catholics, Scottish Highlanders, and American Indians--play an even unlikelier role in the origins of the American Revolution? Drawing on little-used sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution places these typically marginalized peoples in Ireland, Scotland, and North America at the center of a larger drama of imperial reform and revolution. Gaelic and Indian peoples experiencing colonization in the eighteenth-century British empire fought back by building relationships with the king and imperial officials. In doing so, they created a more inclusive empire and triggered conflict between the imperial state and formerly privileged provincial Britons: Irish Protestants, Scottish whigs, and American colonists. The American Revolution was only one aspect of this larger conflict between inclusive empire and the exclusionary patriots within the British empire. In fact, Britons had argued about these questions since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when revolutionaries had dethroned James II as they accused him of plotting to employ savage Gaelic and Indian enemies in a tyrranical plot against liberty. This was the same argument the American revolutionaries--and their sympathizers in England, Scotland, and Ireland--used against George III. Ironically, however, it was Gaelic and Indian peoples, not kings, who had pushed the empire in inclusive directions. In doing so they pushed the American patriots towards revolution. This novel account argues that Americans' racial dilemmas were not new nor distinctively American but instead the awkward legacies of a more complex imperial history. By showcasing how Gaelic and Indian peoples challenged the British empire--and in the process convinced American colonists to leave it--Samuel K. Fisher offers a new way of understanding the American Revolution and its relevance for our own times.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

When the Continental Congress decided to declare independence from the British empire in 1776, ten percent of the population of their fledgling country were from Ireland. By 1790, close to 500,000 Irish citizens had immigrated to America. They were was very active in the American Revolution, both on the battlefields and off, and yet their stories are not well known. The important contributions of the Irish on military, political, and economic levels have been long overlooked and ignored by generations of historians. However, new evidence has revealed that Washington’s Continental Army consisted of a far larger percentage of Irish soldiers than previously thought—between 40 and 50 percent—who fought during some of the most important battles of the American Revolution. Romanticized versions of this historical period tend to focus on the upper class figures that had the biggest roles in America’s struggle for liberty. But these adaptations neglect the impact of European and Irish ideals as well as citizens on the formation of the revolution. Irish contributors such as John Barry, the colonies’ foremost naval officer; Henry Knox, an artillery officer and future Secretary of War; Richard Montgomery, America’s first war hero and martyr; and Charles Thomson, a radical organizer and Secretary to the Continental Congress were all instrumental in carrying out the vision for a free country. Without their timely and disproportionate assistance, America almost certainly would have lost the desperate fight for its existence. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

The first full-length study of the Iroquois' actions during the American Revolution, and their history and culture.

In nineteenth century paintings, the proud Indian warrior and the Scottish Highland chief appear in similar ways--colorful and wild, righteous and warlike, the last of their kind. Earlier accounts depict both as barbarians, lacking in culture and in need of civilization. By the nineteenth century, intermarriage and cultural contact between the two--described during the Seven Years' War as cousins--was such that Cree, Mohawk, Cherokee, and Salish were often spoken with Gaelic accents. In this imaginative work of imperial and tribal history, Colin Calloway examines why these two seemingly wildly disparate groups appear to have so much in common. Both Highland clans and Native American societies underwent parallel experiences on the peripheries of Britain's empire, and often encountered one another on the frontier. Indeed, Highlanders and American Indians fought, traded, and lived together. Both groups were treated as tribal peoples--remnants of a barbaric past--and eventually forced from their ancestral lands as their traditional food sources--cattle in the Highlands and bison on the Great Plains--were decimated to make way for livestock farming. In a familiar pattern, the cultures that conquered them would later romanticize the very ways of life they had destroyed. White People, Indians, and Highlanders illustrates how these groups alternately resisted and accommodated the cultural and economic assault of colonialism, before their eventual dispossession during the Highland Clearances and Indian Removals. What emerges is a finely-drawn portrait of how indigenous peoples with their own rich identities experienced cultural change, economic transformation, and demographic dislocation amidst the growing power of the British and American empires.

Publisher Description

"2022 is the centenary both of the founding of the Irish State and the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. In this book, which describes a more radical edge than previous treatments of Joyce, Luke Gibbons counters much of the Joyce and modernism scholarship, while challenging popular historical accounts of events from 1913 to 1923. He takes up two, widely held notions: first, that Joyce and his writerly contemporaries were set apart from events in Ireland of the period, especially during the writing of Ulysses; and second, that Joyce was not appreciated in his native Ireland at the time, and only came to widespread notice as he was embraced by non-Irish critics much later in the century (during the 1980s and 90s). In contrast, Gibbons here shows multiple points of intersection between the modernist avant-garde and figures and events in the Irish Revolution. As Gibbons suggests, the Ireland of Joyce and Ulysses was the same culture that produced the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution. How is it, he asks, that societies "not yet modern" are able to produce breakthrough works in modernism? Gibbons here redefines the Easter Rising as a modern event, not a belated, resurgent mythic gesture of a bygone Romantic Ireland. By reconceiving the revolution as modern, not as the revival of Celtic pride, as earlier studies claim, Gibbons is able to connect Joyce to other, forward-facing projects, to Yeats's radically conceived Abbey theater, for example, or the Victorian Gael of Standish O'Grady and the insular Catholic nationalism movement. He also places Joyce in a wider modernist community of artists and thinkers, including Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Alfred Döblin, and Hermann Broch, and beyond Europe to writers in America, among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, H. L. Mencken, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Claude MacKay. Thus Gibbons recasts what has gone before in a new, unexpected light, placing Ulysses and the Irish Revolution, not at the end of a process or an Irish "renaissance," but at the beginning of global decolonization, a new way of understanding Irish history at the turn of the century, and Joyce in the context of world literature. The book will be read-and contested-by scholars of modern Irish history and the development of modernism across the arts"--

These texts demonstrate the diversity of opinion on the so-called 'Irish Question' in the final years of Anglo-Irish Union.