"Albion's Seed" is a great book, but it deals from a historical perspective. "Highland Heritage" deals with a modern perspective; the author is a sociologist who travelled to various Highland games & Scottish festivals.

I want to get back to one of Alan's posts:

I'd say it this way. If the girls want to join the Boy Scouts, then how come the boys don't want to join the Girl Scouts? If women file suit to join a men's club, then how about a few men file suit to join the local women's club? You know...just on principle.
Ironically, when I was in high school, my school had an all-girl drum & bugle corps called the Lassies -- in fact, all five high schools in Springfield had Scottish drum, bugle & pipe corps -- The Central High Kilties, the Glendale Glengarry Scots, The Parkview Lassies, the Kickapoo (Brad Pitt's alma mater, ooh!) Bonnie Buchanans and the Hillcrest Highlanders. The original group, the kilties, was started by a Scottish immigrant named R. Ritchie Robertson, who also started a boy scout band. The corps all wore Scottish "kit", and each school had a different taran: Central (Royal Stuart), Glendale (Lindsay), Parkview (Gordon), Hillcrest (Dress Stuart) and Kickapoo (Buchanan). Many of the kilts had been turned into "mini-kilts", which was nice to look at, but it would make any kilt-wearer cringe to think of what had been done to the kilt!

Anyway, when I was in high school, I half-jokingly asked the Lassies sponsor why guys couldn't join, since technically, the girls were all wearing men's attire -- men's kilts, sporran, glenarry, fly plaid, etc. -- I was told that I couldn't because it was a "all-girl" organization, and that male membership had never even been talked about.

Imagine -- an organization with kilts and highland attire that didn't allow the very people it was designed for! It staggers the imagination.

Cheers,

Todd