The History Center is proud to host the Chicago Scots for their June 2023 Scottish American History Forum. This program will feature guest speaker Bill Caudill, Director of the Scottish Heritage Center and Pipe Band Instructor at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Bill will host a presentation titled "The History of the Highland Colonial Settlement of the Upper Cape Fear and Upper Pee Dee Regions of the Carolinas."

Registration is available on the Chicago Scots main website.

Bill Caudill is a native of Waxhaw, North Carolina. He is descended from both Highland Scots and Ulster Scots families who settled in the Carolina sandhills and piedmont regions respectively. Caudill is the founder of the Scottish Heritage Center and the pipe band at St. Andrews University (formerly St. Andrews Presbyterian College), where he was hired after graduation in 1989 to launch the program. Under Caudill’s leadership, The St. Andrews University Pipe Band has risen to become one of the top competing pipe bands in the Eastern United States, winning the Eastern United States Pipe Band Championship for Grade III in 2006 and winning the Southern U.S. Championship—a prize which has been won several times since 1999. In his continuing historical research, Caudill has contributed articles on Scots in the Carolinas to a number of publications, including The Companion to Southern Literature (LSU Press, 2009), several articles for The Encyclopedia of North Carolina History, (UNC Press, 2011), as well as having his research on the failed 1884 emigration to North Carolina cited and mentioned in The Great Book of Skye (2013).