The Scottish Gaelic Tattoo Handbook
The Scottish Gaelic Tattoo Handbook

Author: Emily McEwan

Publisher:

Published: 2016-05

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 9780995099807

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Written by a Gaelic language specialist in Nova Scotia, this handbook will appeal to anyone who loves Scottish culture, Celtic roots, and tattoos. It contains a glossary of nearly 400 authentic Gaelic words and phrases, a history of the language, examples of real-life Gaelic tattoos that went wrong, and advice on how to avoid common mistakes.

The Emigrant Experience
The Emigrant Experience

Author: Margaret MacDonell

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1982-12-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1487586299

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Every man has a story to tell and this was no less true of the hundreds of emigrants from the Highlands and the Hebrides who crossed the Atlantic from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century to settle in North America. This selection of Scottish Gaelic songs brings to light the revealing and often touching poems of some twenty such emigrants. Focusing on themes of emigration and exile, their subjects range from the biblical motif of liberation from tyranny (pre-destined by the Creator who provided a land of bounty across the seas), to the happier future anticipated for his daughter by a loyalist fugitive in North Carolina; from a sense of security on the part of a clergyman settled in Pictou County after the disruption in his homeland, to the disenchantment of an emigrant to Manitoba who longed to move on to North Dakota. Their tone may be lyrical, elegaic, or satirical. Songs from various parts of the new world – the Carolinas, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, and the Canadian west – are included in Gaelic with a facing English translation. A short biography of each bard prefaces the selections attributed to him or her. Detailed notes provide a guide to sources and variant texts, elucidate obscure passages, and define the social and cultural context in which the songs originated. An appendix reproduces the tunes for nine of these songs. This is a book that will inform and entertain both the specialist and the general reader.

Highland Settler
Highland Settler

Author: Charles William Dunn

Publisher: Wreck Cove, N.S. : Breton Books

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9781895415063

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Dr. Charles W. Dunn was born in the manse of Arbuthnott, Scotland, in 1915. He is the Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, Emeritus.

As A' Bhraighe
As A' Bhraighe

Author: Allan the Ridge MacDonald

Publisher: Cape Breton University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781897009062

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It has been said that the greatest Gaelic poets were from Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands. Those who emigrated to Nova Scotia in the 18th and 19th centuries were the living memory of clan history and tradition. Allan the Ridge MacDonald stands out as one poet who inherited and maintained an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary and a superior knowledge of clan and legendary history. In this first compilation and translation of the known Gaelic songs of Allan the Ridge in print, Effie Rankin gives all readers an insight into the life of the poet and the traditions that made him a highly regarded seanchaidh.

No Great Mischief
No Great Mischief

Author: Alistair MacLeod

Publisher: Emblem Editions

Published: 2012-01-11

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1551995476

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Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendents became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.

Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century
Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century

Author: Lachlan MacKinnon

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1771994053

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The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the “long twentieth century” offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively.

Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing
Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing

Author: John G. Gibson

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2017-07-04

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0773550607

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The step-dancing of the Scotch Gaels in Nova Scotia is the last living example of a form of dance that waned following the great emigrations to Canada that ended in 1845. The Scotch Gael has been reported as loving dance, but step-dancing in Scotland had all but disappeared by 1945. One must look to Gaelic Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Antigonish County, to find this tradition. Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing, the first study of its kind, gives this art form and the people and culture associated with it the prominence they have long deserved. Gaelic Scotland’s cultural record is by and large pre-literate, and references to dance have had to be sought in Gaelic songs, many of which were transcribed on paper by those who knew their culture might be lost with the decline of their language. The improved Scottish culture depended proudly on the teaching of dancing and the literate learning and transmission of music in accompaniment. Relying on fieldwork in Nova Scotia, and on mentions of dance in Gaelic song and verse in Scotland and Nova Scotia, John Gibson traces the historical roots of step-dancing, particularly the older forms of dancing originating in the Gaelic–speaking Scottish Highlands. He also places the current tradition as a development and part of the much larger British and European percussive dance tradition. With insight collected through written sources, tales, songs, manuscripts, book references, interviews, and conversations, Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing brings an important aspect of Gaelic history to the forefront of cultural debate.