A dance was devised in eighteenth-century Skye. An exhilarating dance. A dance, a visitor reports, 'the emigration from Skye has occasioned'. The visitor asks for the dance's name. 'They call it America,' he's told. In his introduction to this new edition of his classic and pioneering account of what happened to the thousands of people who left Skye and the wider north of Scotland to make new lives across the sea, historian James Hunter reflects on what led him to embark on travels and researches that took him across a continent. To Georgia, North Carolina and Montana; to Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and the Mohawk Valley; to prairie farms and great cities; to the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia and Washington State. This is the story of the Highland impact on the New World. The story of how soldiers, explorers, guerrilla fighters, fur traders, lumberjacks, railway builders and settlers from Scotland's glens and islands contributed so much to the USA and Canada. It is the story of how a hard-pressed people found in North America a land of opportunity.

'A gripping, heart-breaking account of the famine winter of 1847' - Rosemary Goring, The Herald Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize When Scotland's 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death. Further east, meanwhile, towns and villages from Aberdeen to Wick and Thurso, rose up in protest at the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as people's basic foodstuff. Oatmeal's soaring price was blamed on the export of grain by farmers and landlords cashing in on even higher prices elsewhere. As a bitter winter gripped and families feared a repeat of the calamitous famine then ravaging Ireland, grain carts were seized, ships boarded, harbours blockaded, a jail forced open, the military confronted. The army fired on one set of rioters. Savage sentences were imposed on others. But thousands-strong crowds also gained key concessions. Above all they won cheaper food. Those dramatic events have long been ignored or forgotten. Now, in James Hunter, they have their historian. The story he tells is, by turns, moving, anger-making and inspiring. In an era of food banks and growing poverty, it is also very timely.

On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752 a rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a government agent travelling to nearby Duror where he's evicting farm tenants to make way for his relatives. Campbell's killer evades capture, but Britain's rulers insist this challenge to their authority must result in a hanging. The sacrificial victim is James Stewart, who is organising resistance to Campbell's takeover of lands long held by his clan, the Appin Stewarts. James is a veteran of the Highland uprising crushed in April 1746 at Culloden. In Duror he sees homes torched by troops using terror tactics against rebel Highlanders. The same brutal response to dissent means that James's corpse will for years hang from a towering gibbet and leave a community utterly ravaged. Introducing this new and updated edition of his account of what came to be called the Appin Murder, historian James Hunter tells how his own Duror upbringing introduced him to the tragic story of James Stewart.

Author and consultant James Hunter believes that-in the midst of numerous national corporate scandals-leaders must take a fresh look at leadership through the lens of some very ancient principles. Leadership that is authentic and effective is "servant" leadership-following the principles revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ:
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"Recently it struck me that if love changes people, which I know it does, it would seem to follow that God is the source of change and growth because He is love. Put another way, when people begin loving others through their efforts and behavior, God has the opportunity to work in the lives of both the giver and the receiver."
"In his new book, "The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle, "Hunter demonstrates that leadership and character development are one. But the work, and even the pain, of changing one's self-breaking old, worn-out habits-is not easy. Hunter provides an uncomplicated, straightforward, three-step change process he has seen successfully employed by literally thousands of leaders to effect change in their lives and organizations and fulfill beneficial goals.
This groundbreaking book will open the eyes of frustrated, disheartened leaders at every level and foster change for good at the personal, organizational, and societal level.