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“Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America, which was published in 1989 and explained these phenomena with a clarity that seems even more stunning today. The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.

The Appalachian hill country and much of the Deep South were settled by a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.

The spirit of the Scots-Irish borderlanders could also be seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol; their ancestors staged the Whiskey Rebellion against the U.S. Constitution.

the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign

The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584

In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.

James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession

James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.

Trump has done just that by emulating a classic model of American democratic leadership.

A clue as to just which leadership model can be found on a map. While Trump fans are spread across the country, they are heavily concentrated in and near the Appalachian states

Greater Appalachia has remained culturally distinct for centuries. Migrants from the northern British Isles — Scots, Scots-Irish and others — pushed into these mountains in large numbers from the 1700s onward and did much to create the nation as we know it.

Game Change the movie shows a Palin of almost unfathomable ignorance. Staffers discover that she has never heard of the Federal Reserve and does not know why there are two Koreas; she answers a prep question about the military alliance with Britain by saluting John McCain’s excellent relationship with Queen Elizabeth. Efforts to instruct her send Palin into what one staffer describes as a “catatonic stupor.” And when Palin emerges, she is seized by the grievances that defined her public message from the autumn of 2008 onward. In those dying days of the campaign, she discovered the idea that would shape the final month of the campaign and the rest of her career: the divide between the “real” America—the America-loving America—and the despised rest of the country.

By luck or by some deep political instinct, Palin launched her attack on the credentialed urban elite at exactly the hour that this elite was discrediting itself as at no time since the urban crisis of the 1960s.

It was the mighty brains of Wall Street who first enabled the financial crisis—and then escaped scot-free from the disaster, even as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes, and savings. Palin was speaking to and for constituencies who had steadily lost ground through the previous decade—and who now confronted personal and national disaster. Meanwhile, the people asking for bailouts—and the people deciding whether to grant bailouts—boasted résumés that looked a lot like Obama’s private school/Columbia/Harvard Law School pedigree. That is, when they weren’t outright Obama supporters and donors. And at the same time, the position of America in the world—and of the white majority within America—seemed in question as never before. There, too, Obama could be made to represent every frightening trend: the flow of immigrants (12 million of them between 2000 and 2008, half of them illegal); the rise of non-Western powers like China and India; the deadly threat of terrorism emanating from people with names like “Barack,” “Hussein,” and—give or take a consonant—“Obama.”

A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the Columbian Exchange.

the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in North America before 1492.

Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze.

At Worcester on Wednesday, September 3rd, the Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell routed Charles II and his Scots. The young king – he was twenty-one – slipped away on horseback with a few trusted companions

Shropshire, 40 miles from Worcester

George Penderel

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

For eleven years, from his defeat at the Boyne in July 1690 until his death in September 1701, James II lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Versailles) in one of the most spectacular royal palaces of the Baroque period

Louis was obliged to recognise William III as de facto King of England, as a condition for signing the peace treaty of Ryswick, which marked the end of the War of the League of Augsburg. The treaty in no way affected James II’s status as de jure king, nor his son’s status as de jure Prince of Wales, but James now had to tolerate the presence in Paris, and occasionally at the French Court, of a hostile English ambassador

At the tercentenary of the King’s death, it is surely time to take a closer look at the life that James led in France

James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, fades out of history after their confrontation with the Scottish rebels at Carberry Hill.

So long as she was alive, whether at liberty or in close custody, she was a political force of great danger to Elizabeth

The Catholics supported Mary; the Protestants were mostly against her.

On Louis’ death in January 1515 Francis duly became king of France at the age of twenty

In September 1515 Francis I once more asserted the French claim to Milan

In the spring of 1537, once more under Montmorency, the French attacked Artois in the Netherlands and a number of towns were captured before a truce was agreed with Charles’s regent, Mary of Hungary

The eldest son of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis, Francis was married in April 1558 to Mary Stuart, queen of Scots and niece of François, duc de Guise, and of Charles, cardinal of Lorraine.

To defeat the Guises, Louis de Bourbon, prince de Condé and Huguenot leader, planned the conspiracy of Amboise (March 1560), an abortive coup d’etat in which some Huguenots surrounded the Château of Amboise and tried to seize the King.

Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character.

More serious was Henry’s determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.

The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry’s election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V.

Many of us didn’t see, and still don’t see, how Yglesias’s signing of the letter is supposed to increase the likelihood that VanDerWerff suffers harm. This is VanDerWerff’s most significant complaint against Yglesias

because it comes in the form of a worry over personal safety, rather than as an intellectual challenge to the letter’s contents, this has the effect of preempting critical engagement with VanDerWerff’s response, since disagreement with her no longer seems morally appropriate.

this is my second point — disagreement with her no longer seems logically appropriate, since what’s been offered is not so much a counterpoint to the Harper’s letter but something less cognitive, less vulnerable to the forms and checks of reason and argument

In 1996 the political scientist Samuel Huntington offered several strong claims about the post-Cold War world.

Global politics was becoming not just “multipolar” but “multicivilizational,” he argued, with competing powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West.

“The balance of power among civilizations” was shifting, and the West was entering a period of relative decline.

LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.

“You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.

It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.