SCOTLAND HISTORY

Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 by Leith Davis

Publisher's Synopsis
Acts of Union explores the political relationship between Scotland and England as it was negotiated in the literary realm in the century after the 1707 Act of Union. It examines Britain, one of the precursors to the modern nation, not as a homogeneous, stable unit, but as a dynamic process, a dialogue between heterogeneous elements. Far from being constituted by a single Act of Union, the author contends, Britain was forged - in all the variant senses of that word - from multiple acts of union and dislocation over time.

Ancient Animosity: The Appin Murder and the End of Scottish Rebellion by Lee Holcombe

Synopsis
For 250 years speculation has swirled as to the true murderer of Colin Campbell, and whether James Stewart, hanged as an accessory, really was part of a conspiracy that might have ignited rebellion in Scotland. The rivalry between the Campbell and Stewart clans was connected to the political and religious fires that had already engulfed Britain—the fourth Jacobite rebellion had been extinguished with the blood of thousands of Highlanders only six years before the two bullets pierced Colin’s back in 1752—and one newspaper said the "ancient animosity" between the clans was likely to resume because of the crime. But that prediction was wrong, and the public display of James’s body until the bones blew down was just the most gruesome of policies and events that quelled and finally transformed Scotland. The “Appin murder” figures in the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and elsewhere is rendered as bad history, propaganda, and myth. Dr. Holcombe’s definitive volume—a 20-year project drawing on nearly 500 sources—illuminates tales of buried treasure, shooting matches, spies, treachery and exile, but more importantly solves the murder and tells the story of one society in its death throes and another