A new dance is devised on the Isle of Skye in the eighteenth century. An exhilarating dance. A dance, one visitor reports, that 'the emigration from Skye has occasioned'. The visitor asks for the dance's name. 'They call it America,' he is told.

Now James Hunter, one of Scotland's leading historians, provides the first comprehensive account of what happened to the thousands of people who, over the last 300 years, left Skye and other parts of the Scottish Highlands to make new lives in the United States and Canada.

The product both of painstaking research and extensive travels in North America, this is the definitive story of the Highland impact on the New World, the story of how soldiers, explorers, guerrilla fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks and pioneer settlers from the north of Scotland found, on the other side of the Atlantic, freedoms and opportunities denied to them at home.