For more than a century and a half the real story of Scotlands connections to transatlantic slavery has been lost to history and shrouded in myth. There was even denial that the Scots unlike the English had any significant involvement in slavery .Scotland saw itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation untainted by a slavery past.This book is the first detailed attempt to challenge these beliefs.Written by the foremost scholars in the field , with findings based on sustained archival research, the volume systematically peels away the mythology and radically revises the traditional picture.In doing so the contributors come to a number of surprising conclusions. Topics covered include national amnesia and slavery,the impact of profits from slavery on Scotland, Scots in the Caribbean sugar islands ,compensation paid to Scottish owners when slavery was abolished,domestic controversies on the slave trade,the role of Scots in slave trading from English ports and much else. The book is a major contribution to Scottish history,to studies of the Scots global diaspora and to the history of slavery within the British Empire.It will have wide appeal not only to scholars and students but to all readers interested in discovering an untold aspect of Scotlands past.

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry. Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Examining discomfort’s physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture’s position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort’s triumph so much as discomfort’s curious dispersal into practices that form ‘modern life’ – and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture. The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects, extending our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, cities and ideas); and the conditions under which – by intention or accident – they discomfort.

With visionary epics like The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and Cosmonaut Keep, award-winning Scottish author Ken MacLeod has led a revolution in contemporary science fiction, blending cutting edge science and razor-sharp political insights with pure, over-the-top interstellar adventure. Now MacLeod takes this heady mix to a new level with a stunning new SF masterwork--Newton's Wake. In the aftermath of the Hard Rapture--a cataclysmic war sparked by the explosive evolution of Earth's artificial intelligences into godlike beings--a few remnants of humanity managed to survive. Some even prospered. Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interplanetary star-gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten her way of life. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Everyone shares pictures on the internet, everyone shares videos. But M. M. Cabicar is a phenomenon among writers, a phenomenon whose stories spread with unmatched reach and speed. They are being shared on social networks, they are being shared via e-mail, they are being translated by readers on their own initiative – and now, for the first time, you can read them in an official edition of stories which readers have been passing on with the advisory: "Don't consume food or beverages when reading these, or you might choke with laughter. Don't read them in public, because you will laugh like crazy. If your kids are asleep, muffle the sound of laughter by hiding behind several padded doors!"

Meet Midgie: he’s wee, he’s fiery, and he’s totally fed up. It’s way, way back in the days of old, and the wild lands of Glenfoostie are home to the great Clan Claymore. Like everyone in the glen, Midgie is a member of the clan. He’d rather not be. With the clan chief’s smug and boastful son questioning his combat skills, Midgie’s bid to prove he’s as good as any Claymore is not going well. Nae bother: Midgie knows just what to do. Welcome to the all-new Clan McNumpty! Together with his wee sister, his best friend, a pesky know-all and a Highland calf named Dugald, Clan Chief Midgie embarks on a quest for respect and renown. They must claim their own castle! Triumph at the Highland Games! Hunt the Loch Ness Monster! Yet somehow they just keep making people ANGRY. Perhaps a pyromaniac pixie and killer haggis have something to do with it... Can calamitous Clan McNumpty ever become the heroes of Glenfoostie? As the glen faces the greatest threat it’s ever known, everyone’s about to find out. Join Midgie and the clan for more brave steps and backward steps than a Highland fling. With enough fanciful folklore and fizz-popping flame magic to set the heather on fire, this is a funny and adventure-packed story of courage, determination and learning what it means to believe in yourself for readers aged 8+.

The first ever book-length attempt to strip away the myths and write the real history of Scotland's slavery past. Written to appeal to a wide audience, it contains many original ,surprising and uncomfortable conclusions.

This is an authoritative companion that is global in scope, recognizing the presence of African Diaspora artists across the world. It is a bold and broad reframing of this neglected branch of art history, challenging dominant presumptions about the field. Diaspora pertains to the global scattering or dispersal of, in this instance, African peoples, as well as their patterns of movement from the mid twentieth century onwards. Chapters in this book emphasize the importance of cross-fertilization, interconnectedness, and intersectionality in the framing of African Diaspora art history. The book stresses the complexities of artists born within, or living and working within, the African continent, alongside the complexities of Africa-born artists who have migrated to other parts of the world. The group of international contributors emphasizes and accentuates the interplay between, for example, Caribbean art and African Diaspora art, or Latin American art and African Diaspora art, or Black British art and African Diaspora art. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, the various branches of African studies, African American studies, African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Latin American studies.

This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland’s economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland’s national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.