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This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
these cases were exceptional. The semi-bankrupt landed class of the crofting region simply could not afford to finance large-scale emigration and the government in most years was equally reluctant to provide a subvention. Until the potato famine of the 1840s clearance and expulsion were attractive to most estate factors in theory but were rarely possible in practice. The catastrophic failure of the potatoes in 1846 and the continuation of the blight for several years thereafter was an important watershed in the history of the Highland clearances. For one thing, the
. In search of such ‘primal’ connections, Christina has made two visits to Scotland and intends to make another with her daughter. She describes being strongly affected by the Highland landscape, particularly by its emptiness and her encounters with the remains of deserted settlements, which are quite prevalent in certain areas. She attributes this emptiness to that most iconic episode of Highland history, described by Richards as ‘one of the sorest, most painful, themes in modern Scottish history’: the Highland Clearances
14 PATTERNS OF POPULAR RESISTANCE AND THE CROFTERS’ WAR, 1790–1886 I To many contemporary observers and some later historians one of the most perplexing and puzzling questions of the Highland clearances was the failure of the people to show more active resistance to landlord policies. The economic transformation had caused social havoc, enormous displacement of populations and the destruction of an ancient way of life, yet, the people had apparently remained quiet and accepted their fate. It became common to contrast the violent truculence of the Irish and their
Eric Richards is a commanding figure who has spanned two distinct, but related, scholarly areas of history. These are on the one hand the Highland Clearances and related aspects of Scottish history and on the other migration studies in the British Empire. In each case, he has made contributions of such significance as to transform research in these fields. But while the
from Harriet Beecher Stowe, staunch abolitionist and unwavering champion of the oppressed African American, the other from one of her most relentless opponents. But which is which? In this case the system is not slavery but the Highland Clearances, and it is the second quotation which comes from Stowe, whereas the first is taken from Donald MacLeod’s furious riposte to her. MacLeod’s account of the forced eviction of the tenants of the Duchess of Sutherland, their homes burnt over their heads, their surviving families removed to the barren coastal lands, the
forestall or eliminate resistance. Archaeology can, however, supply details about changing patterns of settlement, as the Irish clachans were abandoned in much the same fashion as the later Highland clearances in Scotland. And more light could be shed on the nature of Irish resistance, described by contemporaries in the same terms of treacherous barbarity ascribed to the American Indians. Further study of military sites could produce evidence, independent of English sources, about the level of Irish technological capabilities in the armed struggle that overwhelmed the
dreamscape’s mythology, the Scots lost their political independence with the Act of Union of Scotland as a site of memory201 1707 and their final battle against the English and the industrial age in 1746 at Culloden, the place ‘where the Clans died’.19 Scotland was then occupied, the defeated rebels hunted down and almost exterminated. Traditional music and dress were banned, and many fled into exile. In the nineteenth century, tens of thousands followed them at the time of the Highland Clearances, when capitalist entrepreneurs pushed smallholder farmers from the land to
too sanguine, view of Scottish–American literary relations’. Scott, like the American Harriet Beecher Stowe, was enormously influential in nineteenth-century literary culture and Manning tries to unravel what Twain claims to have been the misreading of Scott, just as Judie Newman demonstrates Stowe’s mis-reading and mis-representation of the 4 Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett Highland Clearances. In her essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Newman discusses Donald MacLeod’s ‘furious riposte’ to that which he read as a poorly informed
Any discussion of sheep and their representation in contemporary Scottish poetry is overshadowed by the history of the clearance of highlanders from their crofts to make way for the ‘great sheep’. The story of the Highland Clearances is well covered elsewhere, for example by T. M. Devine ( 2018 ), but the cruelty and injustices associated with the movement of peasant farmers from their land is still keenly felt in Highland communities. The highly political play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil ( 1974 ) uses the Cheviot breed of