10 Scots Who Changed America (Online)
Taught by David McNicoll
Although I now live in New York I come from the heart of the Scottish Highlands, a land steeped in
whisky in both story and song, and where I honed my knowledge and enjoyment of our national drink. Over the last decade I have taken that experience and built upon it, representing as ambassador several Scotch brands in the city. I am about to launch a new book exploring the ‘language of whisky’, and the origins of the names of those familiar bottles on the back-bar.
For over 450 years Scots have emigrated to North America in their tens of thousands, settling from Nova Scotia to the Florida Panhandle and everywhere in between, with the two biggest waves of migration coming in the early nineteenth century, and then again following the First World War. Although numbers are smaller than those of say Ireland, there can be no doubting the contribution the Scots have made in making and developing the United States. In this class we look at the lives of ten men whose personal contribution changed America and her people forever, men like Alexander Graham Bell or Andrew Carnegie. From politics to industry, the environment to invention, I’ll also look at the connections and networks that seem to radiate around them and show just how important they were both for their own time and ours.