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

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

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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 141 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Understanding and appreciating my Scots-Irish family

I share Scots-Irish heritage with the author--born in a remote mountain area to a family that was poor, fiercely independent, mostly self-taught and proud. Jim Webb has written a book that explains much about this how hard-to-categorize part of the population thinks and acts.This is good reading for anyone who shares this heritage, and should be required reading for those who work with or interact with us!

Born Fighting

I have never been a history buff, but in doing my family research and learning more about my Scots-Irish heritage, this book was a must-have and it has been a fascinating read. I'd recommend it.

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Another Great Read from Jim Webb

This guy can write! I love his fiction and I'm not even a fiction reader.
This history of his culture of the Scots Irish is a fun as well as education read.
Five Stars!

An Oddly Personal Account

"Born Fighting" by James Webb is a strange book by a troubled man. Ostensibly, it is about the Scots-Irish and how they shaped America. It is actually a tersely written, deeply personal account of what it means to be a descendant of Scots-Irish emigrants, and how this affects many Southerners today. The book has some wonderful qualities, such as the fact that its author "takes no prisoners" in his debates with those who espouse political correctness. For example, Webb includes an account of his return from Vietnam, where he had served honorably in the armed forces (just like many of his Scots-Irish ancestors), and how this made adjustment to civilian life difficult. For example, one extremely liberal law professor evidently delighted in torturing Webb for his service to his country as a Marine, and this understandably got Webb's Scots-Irish blood boiling. Another positive thing about this book is that Webb is very proud to be from the South, and takes up for the Celtic/Scots-Irish qualities that have made the South so distinctive. He obviously learned many of these ideas by reading the works of Celtic Thesis Historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, who wrote that colonial and antebellum Southerners differed from Northerners primarily because the former came from a Celtic-derived culture and Yankees historically came from an English/Germanic-derived culture. On these issues, Webb is on surer footing, and follows somewhat in David Hackett Fischer's able footsteps, too. The problem with this book is that he takes it too far, and converts his respect and admiration for the Scots-Irish into Ancestor Worship, pure and simple. Webb is the latest in a long line of such historians (though, again, this is not really so much a history as a personal account) who have written volumes of books since around 1850. Their general tone is that the Scots-Irish could do no wrong, and built America single-handedly, bringing democracy, reformed religion, and a spirit of independence with them to the New World - and that no other group could match their greatness. However, these scholars have usually insisted on an Anglo-Saxon background for the Scots-Irish, and this is where Webb's unique contribution to the historiography of this subject comes in. He is an Ancestor Worshipper who is a follower of the Celtic Thesis - a new twist on an old debate (for more on Scots-Irish historiography see my reviews of James G. Leyburn's "The Scots-Irish: A Social History" and Grady McWhiney's "Cracker Culture"). I did enjoy this book; however if you want to read a good history of the Scots-Irish, start with Leyburn. Don't get me wrong, you can learn a lot about the Scots-Irish from Webb's book. Ultimately though, I think it tells us more about its author and his idiosycracies than anything else.

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