Great Scottish Heroes ― Fifty Scots Who Shaped the World

Celebrate 50 of Scotland's most exceptional and influential individuals with biographies noting how they helped to change the world

Which Scottish anti-slavery campaigner lost a son in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War? Was the enemy of Scotland’s first "freedom fighter" not England, but ancient Rome? What was the laboratory accident that led to one of the greatest discoveries in modern medicine? How did the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 influence the legal foundation of the greatest superpower the world has ever seen? Which singing superstar overcame a learning difficulty to become a worldwide inspiration? The answers to these and many other questions can be found in Great Scottish Heroes, covering 2,000 years of Scottish history and encompassing outstanding leaders in a broad range of pursuits, including the arts, exploration, medicine, sports, religion, and politics. Even a brief list of Scottish inventions shows the nation’s influence upon our world: television, penicillin, the steam engine, the telephone, the vacuum flask, to name only a few. Scotland has for centuries produced a great number of exceptional, heroic individuals out of all proportion to its small population and geographical size. This concise but wide-ranging book offers biographies of 50 Scottish heroes and heroines, but in truth there are a hundred others, and more, who would qualify for inclusion. These men and women helped to shape the world, and continue to do so today. Great Scottish Heroes shows how they achieved such remarkable success. If you are a Scot by birth, descent, or adoption, this book will make you even prouder of your countrymen. If you are not Scottish, you will wish you were.

Stuart Pearson is the author of Bittersweet: The Memoir of a Chinese Indonesian Family in the Twentieth Century, which was nominated for the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literature in 2010.