SCOTTISH history, it’s been said, is currently so popular it's like the new rock 'n’ roll. We look to historians to tell us about how we have become what we are, and help us understand what we really are today. Yet, just over 50 years ago a professor of history at Aberdeen University observed that the history of Modern Scotland was less studied than that of Yorkshire.

Among those who have been part of that sea-change is Professor Tom Devine, who observes that it has been a “revolution”, with historians puncturing myths and challenging who we really are. One of the special things, he observes, about the way Scotland’s history has been studied is that its chief focus has been on ordinary people, rather than the elites. As Devine puts it: “From the very beginning the Scottish emphasis was on the totality of society and there was a particular interest in the working classes.”

Such interests are reflected in Previously, Scotland’s history festival, which is held in Edinburgh from November 17. Its director, Susan Morrison, observes that: “History is really just about people … Folks who get up in the morning, feed the kids, do a job and hope they can get to bed safely night.”

Here are some of the ways they are making us see ourselves afresh.

1. The Union strengthened Scottish identity rather than weakened it

Professor Tom Devine observes that he regularly reads in blogs that the Union destroyed Scottish identity. But, in fact, he says: “If you take the history of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the key factors you see is the survival of Scottish identity, and indeed its development within the Union.” The current wave of nationalist or identity politics, he points out, couldn’t have taken place without that survival. “If you look at articulate Scots writing in the 18th and 19th centuries they’re all in favour of the Union but they’re very fearful of Scotland being assimilated into England.”

2. There were clearances in the Lowlands, at least as dramatic, if not more, as those in the Highlands

According to Tom Devine’s, whose next book, Dispossessed: A History Of The Scottish Clearances, covers the clearances across Scotland, there is an unremembered story of rapid clearance from the Scottish lowlands, as shocking in its own way as those in the Highlands. “Only recently,” he says, “scholars have started to become aware of displacement of people and loss of land elsewhere in Scotland. One of the arguments in the book is more people lost land in the Highlands than the lowlands and this is going to cause a considerable controversy.”

3. The traditional family never really existed – except maybe in the 1950s

“The popular perception,” says Professor Eleanor Gordon of Glasgow University's The History Of Working-Class Marriage In Scotland project, “is that there has been such a thing as a traditional family, which since the 1960s is breaking down. People cite figures of cohabitation, single parent families, all sorts of things to illustrate that what we are seeing is the breakdown of the traditional family when in fact there had never been such a thing. ”

High death rates in past centuries, she observes, meant there were many one parent families, as did desertion, which stemmed from the difficulty in obtaining divorce. Cohabitation also was far more common than many might expect. The 2014 census revealed that 16 per cent of Scots were living in cohabiting couples, but in the 19th century, says Gordon, rates were fairly similar.

4. Scots living in Scotland really did keep slaves

At Glasgow University, The Runaway Slaves project, has been creating a database of all the adverts that were published in UK newspapers looking to retrieve escaped slaves. And, yes, there are significant numbers of such adverts and stories from Scotland. Mara Menzies is a Black African storyteller, who has lived in Scotland since she was 13, has created an event based around the project, and observes that one of the things that really shocked her was that these people really were treated like slaves, not domestic servants, in a way that she had not imagined would have happened here. They were even made to wear collars. “Slaves wearing collars walked the streets of Scotland," she says. "I wasn’t expecting them to have collars, on which would be their name, property of so and so.”

However, says Menzies, a more positive element that surprised her was the stories she came across that revealed the solidarity and sympathy between working-class Scots and slaves. “There were stories of how the working-class people really got together behind somebody who had run away because they understood about oppression.”

5. Centuries back, Europeans were martyrs too

Attitudes towards death were quite different in the period studied by historical biographer Sarah Fraser. One of the things that struck her, in her research into Henry Stuart, son of James I and VI, was how “life in those times was a moral matter, and it was all about the salvation of your soul and therefore the proper end of man was to make a good death after a well-lived life.” For the people in the times she studied, the whole contemporary idea of seeking eternal youth, would have been absurd. “They saw the salvation of your soul as the point of life. ”

That kind of mindset has recently depicted, for instance, in the Catholic martyrs in the BBC drama, Gunpowder. “It is a very tricky one to handle,” says Fraser, “but this helps us understand someone today who is willing to be a martyr for religious belief. I’m thinking obviously of the Middle East.”

6. Scots did uncomfortably well out of the Empire and slave trade

Scots did well out of the British Empire, economically, and increasingly research is exposing our links to slavery. Since the publication Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past, a collection of essays edited by Tom Devine, our guilt and involvement has been out of the bag. Among those at the forefront of this research is Professor Stephen Mullen of University of Glasgow, organiser of the Historical Conversations talks series and author of It Wisnae Us, the book that lifted the lid on Glasgow’s dark connections. Mullen observes: “Historians no longer debate if chattel slavery and its commerce influenced Scotland. The question is to what extent these activities helped develop the nation? And how should this be marked?”

7. Other parts of Scotland were involved in slavery

“One popular misconception,” Professor Stephen Mullen observes, “is that Scotland's connection with New World slavery was confined to Glasgow and the West of Scotland. The Clyde was the premier Atlantic port but this was a national story. Many young men departed in search of imperial profits: my research on Scots in the West Indies will reveal many became fabulously wealthy in the process. Many were from lower to middling backgrounds, demolishing the myth that only the elites profited.”

8. And we also might want to mull on what we did in Australia and Canada

“Ben Wilkie's forthcoming monograph,” says Stephen Mullen, “on Scots in Australia will reveal much about the appropriation of land and policies towards indigenous people. There is currently a debate around Scots in Canada, especially focused on the first Prime Minister, John A MacDonald, who was born in Glasgow in 1815. Writers like Arthur Herman who argued that Scots were somehow exceptional in their benevolence in colonial settings are now discredited: there is no longer any doubt Scots took up exploitative roles across the British Empire with some gusto, many succeeded and improved the homeland with their wealth.”

9. Scotland had its share of suffragettes and “difficult women”

As Edinburgh's Dangerous Women Project proved last year, Nicola Sturgeon is not the only "dangerous woman" in our history – there have been many. One talk at Previously that sets to focus on some of these trouble-makers is "Dr Lesley Orr’s Regiment of Difficult Women". Among those that will get a mention for challenging authority are, of course, the Suffragettes. Yet, all too often these Scots have failed to be given due profile in tellings of the story of women's suffrage, which tend to focus on what happened down in England.

However, as Orr points out, only has to look at what happened in Perth, when thousands of women occupied the town in the summer of 1914, to see how powerful the movement was. They gathered there to protest the fact that four suffragettes had been incarcerated and were being forcibly fed in Perth Prison. “They sang songs and hymns through the night," describes Orr, "disrupted church services and cinema performances. On one occasion the sister of Arabella Scott (who was forcibly fed morning and night for five weeks) addressed the crowd and then invited them to follow her to the prison. Two thousand sang Scots Wha Hae at the gates.”

Historical researcher Ruth Boreham, who presents a talk at Previously on Mary Somerville (the ground-breaking astronomer who features on the Scottish £10 note), has been uncovering a trail of suffrage that is recorded in the census forms of Scotland – where many chose to define their identity as suffragette. “For instance,” says Boreham, “there’s one woman I’m fascinated by who had put her occupation down as farmer’s wife and suffragette."

10. Our great Scottish landscape, or wilderness, has been dramatically altered by humans

The Historiographer Royal, Christopher Smout, observes that in Scotland we still delude ourselves that our Highlands and islands are wild, relatively untouched places. But, as he points out, “Although it shows mighty forms of nature, the landscape is very, very different from what it would have been a couple of thousand of years ago.” Smout has written an environmental history of Scotland and Northern England, Nature Contested, which looks at the way in which we have shaped our environment, and believes environmental history is a key subject for our times. “Inevitably history reflects what people are worried about in the present day, and what ought to worry us enormously in the present day is what is happening to the environment.”

Previously is from November 17 to 26, historyfest.co.uk