The Lion in the North: One Thousand Years of Scotland's History

344 pp. Includes more than 190 illustrations. ...traces more than a thousand years of Scotland's history, its growth as a nation, and its struggle for independence and the eventual surrender of that independence. This is not the story of one people but of six--Pict and Scot, Briton, Angle, Norseman and Norman--all of whom were slowly united in one contentious kingdom, and whose descendants are now called Scots. This is a narrative history, and it begins with Kenneth the Hardy, son of Alpin and the first King of Alba, the land of the Scots. It ends ten centuries later when the "last voice of an independent Scotland" was heard, when the union government in Westminster was unable to recruit a single platoon of Highlanders to fight in the Crimea.