[BRIEF NOTE] Schivelbusch on Scotland

[rfmcdonald]

From Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery:

Scotland was the inspiration for romantic movements throughout Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century. The various national strains of romanticism chose among the corpus of material provided by James McPherson and his successors, adapting what seemed most suitable to their purposes. For the American colonies and the young United States, Scotland served above all as a political and cultural role model. Scotland was the land of perpetual rebellion against England, a nation that defended itself valiantly against its mighty neighbor, forever coming out on the losing end and yet always demonstrating its virtue, its dignity, its moral strength, and its character. Scotland was the model of an anti-England that young America could emulate in its struggle to form itself into an independent nation. True to the dictum that nothing unites like a common enemy, Scotland's "protest history" and the idea of "greedy England?Egypt holding Israel/Scotland in bondage" were embraced across the Atlantic as a national cause (48-49).

As Schivelbusch goes on to note, the heavily Scottish character of white immigration to the South went on to define the nascent Southern identity, complete with the emphasis on defeat. Scotland was the South's role model.