As we approach the peak travel season of the year, one website that may prove useful to those planning visits during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays is the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center, which offers a nationwide map of major hub airports with color-coded status reports on Flight Delay Information. A text-only report on the status of major airports is also available.
In late October, the College Board announced that college prices for the 2008-09 academic year have risen just slightly faster than the Consumer Price Index. They also suggest that while more student financial aid is available than ever before, the number of private loans available for higher education had begun to shrink even before the recent credit crisis hit.
The College Board has issued two new reports related to college pricing and student aid which may be helpful to students, parents, families and policymakers, Trends in College Pricing and Trends in Student Aid.
More from Arthur Herman’s excellent How the Scots Invented the Modern World on America’s Scotch-Irish heritage:
“From the point of view of the colonial government and locals, they had come at the right time. English emigration to America had fallen off; and non-English settlers such as Germans and Hugenot French had not yet appeared in large numbers. The Scotch-Irish settlements began pushing the frontier further and deeper into the Appalachians. Unlike many of their early English predecessors, they did not expect an easy time of it. Prepared for the worst, they carved a new life for themselves out of the wilderness, taking land from neighbors or natives when it suited them. The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.
“They settles in small farm communities, usually on the lee side of a ridge or in a creek hollow, clustering together according to family or region, like their remote Highland ancestors. A typical farm consisted of a ‘cowpen’ or livestock corral of a sort familiar to a Lowland or Border farmer, and a cabin built of logs. The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.
“Across southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Tennessee, their extended families spread out – Alexanders, Ashes, Caldwells, Campbells, Calhouns, Montgomerys, Donelsons, Gilchrists, Knoxes, and Shelbys – establishing a network of clanlike alliances and new settlements. They named their communities – such as Orange County (in North Carolina), Orangeburg (in South Carolina), Galloway, Derry, Durham, Cumberland (after the Border county in England), Carlisle, and Aberdeen – after the places and loyalties they had left behind. In North Carolina they founded towns called Enterprise, Improvement, and Progress; and in Georgia and western Virginia, towns called Liberty.
“Placenames and language reflected their northern Irish or southern Lowlands origins. They said ‘whar’ for ‘where,’ ‘thar’ for ‘there,’ ‘critter,’ for ‘creature,’ ‘nekkid’ for ‘naked,’ ‘widder’ for ‘widow,’ and ‘young-uns’ for ‘young ones.’ They were always ‘fixin’’ to do something, or go ‘sparkin’’ instead of ‘courting,’ and the young’uns ‘growed up’ instead of ‘grew up.’ As David Hackett Fisher has suggested, these were the first utterings of the American dialect of Appalachian mountaineers, cowboys, truck drivers, and backcountry politicians. The language was also shamelessly intimate and earthy: passersby were addressed as ‘honey’ and children as ‘little shits.’ They dubbed local landmarks Gallows Branch or Cuttthroat Gap or Shitbritches Creek (in North Carolina). . . .
“Neighbors, including the Indians, soon learned to treat them with respect, not to say fear. One Englishman described an Ulster Scot neighbor: ‘His looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil, should he meet him face to face.’ They did not bear much resemblance to their compatriot, Francis Hutcheson. Instead, Ulster Scots were quick-tempered, inclined to hard work followed by bouts of boisterous leisure and heavy drinking (they were the first distillers of whisky in the New World, employing native corn and rye instead of Scotch barley), and easy to provoke into fighting. The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for ‘talk,’ meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.
“One reason their cultural impact was so widespread was that they were constantly moving. It was said that no Scotch-Irish family felt comfortable until it had moved twice. Even before the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys were fully settled, they were pushing into Virginia and the Carolinas. The governors of these colonies, Scots themselves, welcomed the new settlers; Ulster Scots began arriving in large numbers in the 1720s and 1730s, and under Governor Gabriel Johnson, a native of Dumfriesshire, expansion came to include Highland immigrants after the Forty-five. By 1760, North Carolina was practically Little Scotland: a ‘Mac-ocracy,’ in the words of one of the Ulstermen’s enemies. By the end of the century, some were moving into Georgia, and as far south as the Savannah River.
“The Scotch-Irish South was a breeding ground for a type of strong, independent man and woman, a school for natural leaders. Andrew Jackson was son of an Ulster Scot immigrant, Hugh Jackson, a wealthy weaver and merchant from Carrickfergus. In 1765 he led a group of emigrants to America into South Carolina. His son was a typical product of the tight-knit, tough, and quarrelsome culture of Ulster Scot Carolina, and chose his wife from a similar Scotch-Irish clan. Another immigrant, Captain Robert Polk, had joined the parade of emigrants from County Donegal for the New World slightly earlier. His son settled in Virginia, and his five children, Robert’s grandchildren, ended up in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. James Knox Polk was born there in 1795, eventually representing his state as senator and still later serving as twelfth President of the United States.
“. . . John Henry emigrated from Scotland around 1730; he numbered among his relations on his mother’s side that stalwart of the Moderate literati William Robertson. He settled in Hanover County, Virginia, which was quickly becoming home to Scots and Ulster Scot families, and married another relative, Sarah Syme. Their son Patrick Henry was born in 1736. His most famous maxim, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death,’ abruptly but perfectly encapsulates the mentality of these backcountry Scottish communities, in which living as you pleased – a crude homegrown version of Hutcheson’s notion of man’s moral liberty – was a matter of birthright. In 1768 Mecklenberg County even told the North Carolina colonial assembly, ‘We shall ever be more ready to support the government under which we find the most liberty.’
“Defending that liberty against all challengers required force of will and a keen sense of valor. Here, in America, a warrior ethos took root, which was as fierce and violent as that of any Highland clan. President Andrew Jackson would remember his mother telling him, ‘Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault or battery. Always settle them cases yourself.’ One day she scolded him: ‘Stop that, Andrew. Do not let me see you cry again. Girls were made to cry, not boys.’ ‘What are boys made for, mother? he asked. She answered, ‘To fight.’
“Jackson spent his life fighting, both as a soldier and as a gentleman of honor in duels that took the lives of two opponents. Dueling, and the code of honor that went with it, became embedded in Southern culture. Men defended themselves with their fists, knives, and muskets. Training with a gun and target practice were standard parts of a boy’s, and sometimes a girl’s, training for dealing with the real world. Running battles or feuds between backcountry families were as common, and as vicious, as any between Scottish Borders dynasties or Highland clans – the epic Highland clashes of Campbells and MacDonalds would later be matched in backcountry America by those of the Hatfields and McCoys.
“To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Border descendent from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that ‘we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained.’ ‘Lynch’s Law,’ and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture – an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people.
“The Presbyterian Ulster Scots also brought over their burning hatred of Episcopalians (especially since, as British subjects, they had to pay taxes for the established Anglican Church in America). When one Anglican missionary tried to preach in the Carolina mountains, the locals ‘disrupted his services, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whisky to his congregation.’ The missionary, an Englishman, learned to hate his would-be Scotch-Irish converts with a passion. ‘They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life,’ he wrote, ‘and seem not desirous of changing it.’”
Haysville Community Library 