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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Catriona M.M. MacDonald, "The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History" (John Donald, 2024)
Description: Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day.
Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland’s...