Irish American

Irish Americans (Irish: Gael-Mheiriceánaigh) are an ethnic group comprising Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Ireland. About 33 million Americans — 10.1% of the total population — self-identified as being of Irish ancestry in the 2017 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. This compares with a population of 6.6 million on the island of Ireland. In contrast to Ireland, surveys since the 1970s have shown consistent majorities or pluralities of Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry as also self-identifying as being Protestant, and are actually mostly Scotch-Irish, the American descendants of the Ulster Protestants (mostly Ulster Scots) who emigrated from Ireland to the United States. The fact remains, however, that it is a useful term. Despite its hybrid nature, with one term biological and cultural and the other geographical, it expresses a historical reality: the Scots who lived in Ulster before they came to America simply were not, in background, religion, and many other aspects of culture, identical with the Irish of the southern provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught; neither were they, after many decades, any longer identical with the people of Scotland. A century of use has established the double name, and no substitute is accurate... It is best, therefore, to retain the hyphenated term and make its meaning clear.Their history in Ireland is another story, in which they might well be called Ulster Scots; but in this country, where they have been called Scotch-Irish for two hundred years, it would be absurd to give them a name by which they are not known here. Far be it from us to call them the Ulster Scots of America or to designate them by any other name by which they may be called abroad. Here their name is Scotch-Irish; let us call them by it.Support for Irish Confederate soldiers from home was vital both for encouraging them to stay in the army and to highlight to native white southerners that the entire Irish community was behind the Confederacy. Civilian leaders of the Irish and the South did embrace the Confederate national project and most became advocates of a 'hard-war' policy.Native tolerance, however, was also a very important factor in Irish integration .... Upper-class southerners, therefore, did not object to the Irish, because Irish immigration never threatened to overwhelm their cities or states.... The Irish were willing to take on potentially high-mortality occupations, thereby sparing valuable slave property. Some employers objected not only to the cost of Irish labor but also to the rowdiness of their foreign-born employees. Nevertheless, they recognized the importance of the Irish worker to the protection of slavery.... The Catholicism practiced by Irish immigrants was of little concern to Southern natives.You will scarcely ever find an Irishman dabbling in counterfeit money, or breaking into houses, or swindling; but if there is any fighting to be done, he is very apt to have a hand in it.' Even though Pat might ''meet with a friend and for love knock him down,'' noted a Montreal paper, the fighting usually resulted from a sudden excitement, allowing there was 'but little 'malice prepense' in his whole composition.' The Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati in 1853, saying that the 'name of 'Irish' has become identified in the minds of many, with almost every species of outlawry,' distinguished the Irish vices as 'not of a deep malignant nature,' arising rather from the 'transient burst of undisciplined passion,' like 'drunk, disorderly, fighting, etc., not like robbery, cheating, swindling, counterfeiting, slandering, calumniating, blasphemy, using obscene language, &c.…the Irish Nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.I do not think will afford sufficient allurements to the citizens of other States ... The children of Irish parents born abroad are sometimes more Irish than the Irish themselves, and they would come with added experience and knowledge to our country....|4=Sen. Patrick Kenny, Seanad Éireann 1924, Baseball for Irish kids was a shortcut to the American dream and to self-indulgent glory and fortune. By the mid-1880s these young Irish men dominated the sport and popularized a style of play that was termed heady, daring, and spontaneous.... Ed Delahanty personified the flamboyant, exciting spectator-favorite, the Casey-at-the-bat, Irish slugger. The handsome masculine athlete who is expected to live as large as he played.2 Russia is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. The vast majority of its population (80%) lives in European Russia, therefore Russia as a whole is included as a European country here. Irish Americans (Irish: Gael-Mheiriceánaigh) are an ethnic group comprising Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Ireland. About 33 million Americans — 10.1% of the total population — self-identified as being of Irish ancestry in the 2017 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. This compares with a population of 6.6 million on the island of Ireland. In contrast to Ireland, surveys since the 1970s have shown consistent majorities or pluralities of Americans who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry as also self-identifying as being Protestant, and are actually mostly Scotch-Irish, the American descendants of the Ulster Protestants (mostly Ulster Scots) who emigrated from Ireland to the United States. Three million people separately self-identified as Scotch-Irish, but demographers have long assumed the U.S. Census Bureau self-identification estimate of the Scotch-Irish to be a serious undercount (in part, because along with English and other British ancestries, many Scotch-Irish self-identify as being of 'American ancestry'). While some argue that the Scotch-Irish should be considered Irish, considering that conversions by Irish Catholics during the Reformation to Protestant churches were historically rare, that intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in both Ireland and in the United States was also historically rare, while interethnic and interdenominational marriage amongst Protestants in Ulster was relatively common, multiple historians have argued instead that the 'Scotch-Irish' distinction remains necessary as the Ulster Protestants remain a distinct ethnoreligious group from the Irish Catholics. Half of the Irish immigrants in the colonial era came from the Irish province of Ulster while the other half came from the other three provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, and Connacht). In the 17th century, immigration from Ireland to the Thirteen Colonies was minimal, confined mostly to indentured servants, and peaked with prisoner-of-war penal transports to Virginia from the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1650s. From 1717 to 1775, though scholarly estimates vary, the most common approximation is that 250,000 immigrants from Ireland emigrated to the Thirteen Colonies. By 1790, approximately 400,000 people of Irish birth or ancestry lived in the United States, and from 1814 to 1845, 500,000 more immigrants came from Ireland to the United States. These early immigrants were overwhelmingly members of the Protestant minority in Ireland who principally descended from Scottish and English tenant farmer colonists and colonial administrators who had settled the Plantations of Ireland, the largest of which was the Plantation of Ulster. In Ireland, they are referred to as the 'Ulster Scots' and the 'Anglo-Irish' respectively, and because the Protestant population in Ireland was and remains concentrated in Ulster and because Protestants in Northern Ireland on census reports have historically self-identified their national identity as 'British' rather than 'Irish' or 'Northern Irish,' Protestants in Ireland are collectively referred to as the 'Ulster Protestants.' Additionally, the Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish intermarried to some degree, and the Ulster Scots also intermarried with Huguenot refugees from France following the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, and some of the Anglo-Irish settlers were actually Welsh or Manx. However, they almost never intermarried with the native Irish Catholic population (in part because intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics was banned by the Penal Laws during the Protestant Ascendancy), and in turn, the Irish Catholics almost never converted to Protestant churches during the Reformation. (For that matter, intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland has remained rare into the 21st century and remains stigmatized due to the Troubles and the dissident Irish Republican campaign that has followed them.) Of the immigrants from Ireland to the United States prior to the American Revolutionary War in 1775, approximately 10,000 were Catholics. By 1800, the number of Irish Catholics who had immigrated had increased in absolute terms to approximately 20,000, or approximately 3 percent of the Irish population in the United States, as one-sixth of the white population in the United States by that time (which in the 1800 U.S. Census was 4.3 million) was composed of those of Scotch-Irish descent (or approximately 718,000). Like most Catholics in the United States at the time, these Irish Catholics settled almost exclusively in Maryland and Pennsylvania. In 1700, the estimated population of Maryland was 29,600, about one-tenth of which was Catholic (or approximately 3,000). By 1756, the number of Catholics in Maryland had increased to approximately 7,000, which increased further to 20,000 by 1765. In Pennsylvania, there were approximately 3,000 Catholics in 1756 and 6,000 by 1765. By the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, there were approximately 24,000 to 25,000 Catholics in the United States out of a total population of approximately 3 million. However, the majority of the Catholic population in the United States during the colonial period came from England, Germany, and France, not Ireland, despite failed academic efforts by Irish historiographers to demonstrate Irish Catholics as being more numerous in the colonial period than previous scholarship had indicated. Additionally, some Irish Catholics that immigrated to the United States during the colonial period converted to Baptist and Methodist churches during the Second Great Awakening, and in contrast to Ireland historically and the United States in the 19th century, in the Shenandoah Valley in the 18th century, intermarriage among Ulster Protestants and the small number of Irish Catholics in the region was not uncommon or stigmatized. Historians have characterized the etymology of the term 'Scotch-Irish' as obscure, and the term itself as misleading and confusing to the extent that even usage of the term by authors in historical literature about the Scotch-Irish (such as The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash) is often incorrect. Historians David Hackett Fischer and James G. Leyburn note that usage of the term is unique to North American English and is rarely used by British historians, or in Scotland or Ireland. The first recorded usage of the term was by Elizabeth I of England in 1573 in reference to Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders who crossed the Irish Sea and intermarried with the Irish Catholic natives of Ireland. Usage of the term in reference to Ulster Scots immigrating to the United States in the 18th century likely became common among Episcopalians and Quakers in Pennsylvania, and recorded usage of the term with this meaning occurred as early as 1757 by Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. However, multiple historians have noted that from the time of the American Revolutionary War until 1850, the term largely fell out of usage, as most Ulster Protestants self-identified as 'Irish' until large waves of immigration of Irish Catholics during and after the 1840s Great Famine in Ireland led those Ulster Protestants in America who lived in proximity to the new immigrants to change their self-identification from 'Irish' to 'Scotch-Irish,' while those Ulster Protestants that did not live in proximity to Irish Catholics continued to self-identify as 'Irish,' or as time went on, to start self-identifying as being of 'American ancestry.' Surveys conducted since the 1970s have shown consistent majorities or pluralities of those who self-identify as being of Irish ancestry in the United States as also self-identifying as Protestants. While those historians note that renewed usage of 'Scotch-Irish' after 1850 was motivated by anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices among Ulster Protestants, considering the historically low rates of intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics in both Ireland and the United States, as well as the relative frequency of interethnic and interdenominational marriage amongst Protestants in Ulster, and the fact that not all Protestant migrants from Ireland in the 18th century were Ulster Scots, James G. Leyburn argued for retaining its usage for reasons of utility and preciseness: