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Rating: 
Summary: Nonsense
Review: Although fun to read, this book relies almost exclusively upon English and Northern travel accounts, and their descriptions of Scots, Irish, Celtic, and American Southerners. Because they all share the same traits- lazy, drunken, idle, violent, uneducated- it is concluded that this Southern character directly stems from his Celtic ancestors.
Although the South is clearly influenced by Celtic migration, the logic of following English accounts to portray Scots, Irish and Southerns as the same is illogical, considering English accounts of blacks and Native Americans (and almost every other culture they met) give the exact same descriptions. Suggesting that Africans and Scotsmen share the same decendancy, because Anglos have decribed both as lazy, violent and savage is ridiculous, yet this is exactly the logic that McWhiney follows.
Scots and Irish influences are clearly felt in the South, but they are beyond the English and Northern comic book descriptions that McWhiney trusts
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but perhaps overstates Celtic influence
Review: I read this book while writing my MA thesis concerning the origin of antebellum concealed weapon laws. While I generally agree with Cracker Culture's thesis -- that the South was dominated by a Celtic cultural survival, unlike the North, I believe that McWhiney and McDonald may have overstated the breadth of this Celtic survival. Much of the South's distinctive culture comes specifically from the Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in the 18th century, setting up cultural patterns that survive even today. By the time Irish and Welsh immigrants arrive, the patterns were already well established.
Rating:
Summary: Glad to see this back in print
Review: I'm always amused to find people from distant places trying to tell our people our history. McWhiney knows of what he speaks, and though his brushstrokes are broad, his essential thesis is strong.
My people were southerners, and were English, Scots and Irish. The point that many miss is that "English" is not itself a singular cultural group and was heavily infused with Celtic influences, too. This is where McWhiney's thesis stumbles via lumping the whole of it as the Celts Vs. the English. I'd like to see him deal with the northern English versus the historical southern English, perhaps. My grandmother's mother still used the term "sothren" with considerable disdain.
To the German gentleman (and others reading this feeling similarly), please read a true account of the south, and know that your stereotypes of southerners are quite wrong. It's a far more complicated story, however the history books have been written by the victors in the war of northern aggression (aka the "American Civil War").
Rating:
Summary: Glad to see this back in print
Review: I'm always amused to find people from distant places trying to tell our people our history. McWhiney knows of what he speaks, and though his brushstrokes are broad, his essential thesis is strong. My people were southerners, and were English, Scots and Irish. The point that many miss is that "English" is not itself a singular cultural group, and was heavily influence by the so-called "Celtic" ways as well. This is where McWhiney's thesis stumbles; I'd like to see him deal with the poor English versus the southern English, perhaps. My grandmother's mother still used the term "sothren" with considerable disdain. To the German gentleman (and others reading this feeling similarly), please read a true account of the south, and know that your stereotypes of southerners are quite wrong. It's a far more complicated story, however the history books have been written by the victors in the war of northern aggression (aka the "American Civil War").
Rating: 
Summary: Seminal
Review: McWhiney's Cracker Culture is indispensable cultural history. That fact is made all the more obvious by the ancient Anglophilic hatred of Celts that remains a significant factor in denouncing such cultural views as everything from impossible for Celtic culture surely could not exist post-English conquest to racist. How it can be that study of Celtic heritage is racist while study of African heritage is anti-racist is never addressed, nor is it addressed how study of both Europe and North America through English eyes and prepossessions is objective and definitive while small steps taken to uncover long denied Celtic heritage are racist and intolerant. As George Orwell knew, in the world of Marxism, cultural as much as politcal/economic, some animals are more equal than others, and in this contemporary PC time Celtic and Southern are two of the greatest whipping boys. While the book is not perfect, many of the objections raised by serious readers are not fully valid because McWhiney does treat them, though quickly. For example, McWhiney is well aware of the importance of Southeastern AmerIndian culture on Southerners, claiming that in many ways those AmerIndians and Celts found much to admire in one another and so reinforced one another's basic cultural views and practices. The many marraiges between whites of Celtic ancestry in the South and AmerIndians (leading to both whites of some Indian ancestry and members of Indian nations, such as Cherokee chief John Ross) suggest that McWhiney is correct in that regard. But as that is not the focus of the book, it is not belabored. Another example is that McWhiney certainly addresses the complexity of many citizens of England (especially in the north and the west, near Scotland and Wales) being of mixed, and often largely Celtic, ethnicity and culture. In fact, many academic attacks on McWhiney have denied this very fact that McWhiney acknowledges, asserting that English citzenship equlas pure Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and culture. This work is slowly blowing away the cultural bigotries that have seen no whites save Anglo-Saxons as making significant contributions to America.
Rating: 
Summary: Shoddy scholarship and racially divisive
Review: This book misses the mark almost completely! The south's culture and origins rests more in the Anglo-protestant tradition. The patriarchs of the south were mostly of English descent. Their plantations were mini-recreations of what they remembered the British Aristocracy to possess. Granted, there was a large Scottish influx in the south, especially in Virginia and North Carolina, the majority of Celtic Scots, Irishmen and Welsh settled in the North. It doesn't account for why more Irishmen, Scots and Welsh fought for the North and yet there was so much more hostility. Those Irishmen and Scots who fought in the North came from an Ireland and Scotland that was subject to the English and viewed the south, with its slavery, as a re-creation of what they'd left behind. They wanted no man to be subjected to such ways. The northern anglos referred to in this book came from the line of those who split with the crown. Cracker ways indeed! I wished I hadn't bought this one. It was a waste.
Rating:
Summary: Cracker Culture
Review: This book more or less takes the position that the civil war between the north and south was more a conflict of cultures than anything else. The yankees being predominently of English stock were industrious, money grubbing, uptight dullards and the people of the south having more people of Celtic ancestry were a tempermental, emotional lot who would rather spend their days screwing their women and running through the woods with their hound dogs than working their fingers to the bone from sun up till sun down. Being a southerner of celtic ancestry maybe I should have gotten offended by some of the stereotypes laid out in this book but I found it interesting and entertaining instead.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but not the whole story
Review: Why is the South so different from the rest of the country? It wasn't always so. In our revolutionary period, Southerners were just as angry at British offenses in the North as Northerners were, while Northerners cheered South Carolina's victory at Sullivan's Island just as passionately as Southrons did. Virginians like George Washington and Daniel Morgan fought in the North while the greatest general of the Southern theater was the Rhode Islander Nathaniel Greene. Why did Northern and Southern unity quickly become mutual suspicion and eventually dissolve into hostility? Was race the only reason? To Grady McWhiney, the question is largely a cultural one. McWhiney feels that Southern culture was and is Celtic. Most of the original settlers in the North came from England, while most of the South's early settlers came from the most Celtic regions of the British Isles(Ulster, Scotland, Cumberland, the West Country, etc). These settlers put a Celtic stamp on the South, influenced all who settled there, Celt or not, and brought with them their age-old hostility to the English, a hostility that was(and continues to be)reciprocated by the "English" of the North. Celtic influence on Southern culture cannot be seriously disputed. Anyone who has ever heard bluegrass or country music can hear just one aspect of it. And that North and South are still mutually hostile is also unarguable. The uneducated bigot in the movies usually has a Southern accent and prominently displays a Confederate flag. But I think McWhiney oversimplifies. Celtic influence was there, but it was not alone. As Charles Hudson pointed out in The Southeastern Indians, Native American influence on Southern culture(which McWhiney ignores)was considerable, a fact well known to many of us with families from the southeastern US who have unsuccessfully tried to untangle our genealogies. In short, Cracker Culture is worth your time. Just don't stop with it.
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