Review: How historians shaped Scotland’s past

Scottish history is not a simple list of past events here: historians, amateurs and professionals, lay down the influential narrative of what happened at crucial points of the development of the nation.

Official response and confirmed impact

Dr Macdonald identifies and assesses professionally the sages of the past.

It is in analysing the credibility and reliability of the historians of Scotland in the past that the reader is provided with an extensive and original contribution to the general understanding of the evolution of the historical discipline in modern Scotland.

Not everyone wants to be or can be an historian, and for a place such as Scotland the cohort of historians at any one time was rather small.

Reflecting their era, no doubt, many of the historians appear to have been treading water and not advancing their subject much.

In those rather introverted circumstances, Dr Macdonald shows how historical fiction and popular histories advanced the Scottish historical imagination.

Incident background

More broadly, this study explains why, despite the wide interests, a truly British history has never emerged.

History is far more than a recitation of government documents; novelists and popular historians scorned by the historical establishment in their time are shown in their works often to have anticipated the interest and insights that later came from the professional historian.