The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (review)

social status. Ironically, without their affluence, the luxury voyage and reflection on the lives of women could not have happened. The journey down the river is a self-proclaimed metaphor for the course of women's lives. Both journeys in the novel mark a rite of passage for these women: from adolescence into adulthood and adulthood into old age. As the steamboat churns down the river during the menopausal voyage, each character reflects upon the tribulations and triumphs that define her life. Using these private reveries to make the readers confidants of each woman, Smith skillfullyjuxtaposes their public personas and private selves, revealing that identity is a complex continuum reflecting both perception and projection. The shifting point of view enables Smith to explore the paradoxes that dominate human life: the significance of triviality and the reality of appearance. The pivotal issue governing most decisions for Smith's characters is the conflict between duty and desire. Smith juxtaposes the fairy tale fantasy with grim reality, defining happily ever after as the realization that life goes on. In the end, there is no grand epiphany, merely the poignant affirmation of life, as it is, wrinkles and all. —Annette Coleman McGrew Patrick Griffin. The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation ofa British Atlantic World, 16891764 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 244 pages. $19.95. In this new book, Patrick Griffin of Ohio University joins a rich scholarly dialogue concerning the role of Scots Irish in the formation of colonial America. This much studied people have in most cases been understood by historians as the product first of the complex social, economic, religious and political history of Ulster settlement from the early 17th through much of the 18th century, and second of the powerful impact of the cultural hearth of frontier America. While Griffin does not dismiss these influences, they do not stand at the center of his story. Rather he sees the Scots-Irish as defined by the great issues that have shaped the modern British tradition-the struggle for the rights and liberties of free Britons embodied in the Glorious Revolution and by the development of Reformed Protestantism. Thus Griffin's history revolves around political and religious identity and the emergence of a strong sense of "Britishness" among the Scots Irish in 18th century America. 77 Central to his evaluation of this immigrant group is their role in the transformation of English America into British America. His choice of an historic time frame for his subject is significant. The Glorious Revolution (1689) and the Treaty of Paris (1763) — fundamental moments in British history which come to define modem Britain — also, in Griffin's view, defined the Scots Irish. The author's extensive archival research focuses, in fact, on a more narrow time frame and constructs its argument by examining the Ulster migration of 17181729 when the conditions of out-migration were shaped by the Old Light-New Light divisions in Ulster Presbyterianism and by crisis in the linen industry. He then follows this first wave of Ulster settlers to Pennsylvania in the 1730s and 1740s when the Great Awakening further polarized the new American settlers. The value of this more narrow focus is that it provides an in-depth analysis of community conflict and religious change in Ulster and Pennsylvania that enriches our understanding of the Scots Irish. The weakness is that by understating the larger Ulster legacy of the Scots Irish, including the history of early plantation and the subsequent 18th century evolution of Ulster society, and by not carrying his account in any detail beyond the Pennsylvania settlements in the 1740s, Griffin underestimates the extraordinary evolution and adaptation of the Scots Irish and the impact of the frontier. However, students who read Griffin's work in the context of other recent Scot Irish scholarship will find his close study of their political and religious culture in the first phase of migration to be new and enlightening. —Curtis W Wood, Jr. Crystal Wilkinson. Water Street. Toby Press, 2002. 174 pages. $19.95 Hardcover. After a rather stellar narrative debut with Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), Crystal Wilkinson's second collection, Water Street (2002), is...