Download Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South by Grady McWhiney PDF

The writer insists that Southerners and Northerners have been by no means alike. American colonists who settled south and west of Pennsylvania through the seventeenth and 18th centuries have been in most cases from the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. The tradition that those humans retained within the New international bills in enormous degree for the variation among them and the Yankees of recent England, such a lot of whom originated within the lowlands of the southeastern half the island of england. From their sturdy base within the southern backcountry, Celts and their “Cracker” descendants swept westward through the antebellum interval till they'd proven themselves and their practices around the outdated South. simple between these practices that made up our minds their conventional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was once the herding of cattle at the open diversity, unlike the combined agriculture that was once the norm either in southeastern Britain and in New England. The Celts delivered to the outdated South leisurely ways in which fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors, Southerners have been often violent; they scorned pacifism; they thought of fights and duels honorable and regularly overlooked legislation designed to regulate their activities. furthermore, relations and kinship have been even more vital in Celtic Britain and the antebellum South than in England and the Northern usa. basic alterations among Southerners and Northerners formed the process antebellum American background; their clash within the 1860s was once now not a lot brother opposed to brother as tradition opposed to culture.