British American
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British Americans are Americans whose ancestry stems, either wholly or in part, from one of the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom. The term is seldom used by people to refer to themselves (less than 1% chose it in the 2000 census), and is used primarily as a demographic or historical research tool.
British Americans have English, Scottish, Scots-Irish (Ulster), or Welsh family heritages, or came from Canada where their ancestors were of British descent. Catholic Irish-Americans are not usually categorized as having British ancestry. They do not usually consider themselves as being British Americans. Immigrants from Canada of British ancestry call themselves Canadian Americans. Similarly, most British Americans tend to differentiate to being English, Scottish or Welsh and do not identify with Great Britain as a whole, therefore tending not to refer to themselves as British American (see English American, Scottish American, Welsh American, or Northern Irish American).
British-Americans are the largest ethnic group of Americans, as there are 57.6 million British-Americans and more than 100 million Americans with significant British ancestry.
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[edit] British American or American?
Many British Americans have ancestry in America that dates back to colonial times in the 17th and 18th centuries. Those who went to New England are known as Yankees. With their roots being in America for such a long period, many British Americans and a significant number of Irish Americans have begun to think of themselves ancestrally simply as "Americans." This is especially true in the South. In American society, hyphenated-Americanism prevails because so much of the population has relatively recent roots elsewhere.
Many other Americans are uncertain about the relative proportions in their own ancestry or have forgotten the origins of their distant ancestors, or prefer to identify with the ethnicity of ancestors who arrived more recently, which provide more distinctive folkways than the general American culture. Even as prominent a figure as Senator John Kerry, scion on his mother's side of an old Yankee family, was astonished to discover his paternal grandfather, whom everyone assumed was Irish Catholic, had been born Jewish in Europe, but, before coming to America, had chosen an Irish name and become Catholic.
Great Britain provided millions of immigrants to America after 1776. They typically assimilated quite rapidly.
[edit] Number of British Americans
In the 2000 US Census, 60.4 million Americans reported British ancestry. These include:
- 24.5 million English
- 4.9 million Scottish
- 4.3 million (though estimates suggest 27.3 million) Scots-Irish (Ulster)
- 1.7 million Welsh
- 1 million British (answered "British" as ancestry on the Census)
These figures make British Americans one of the largest "ethnic" groups in the U.S. when counted collectively (although the Census Bureau does not count them collectively, as each of the above is a separate ethnic group, that is English or Scottish or Welsh or Scots-Irish). The Germans and Hispanic are the largest self-reported ethnic groups in the nation.
In the United States Census, 2000, only 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the population of the USA) officially claimed Scots-Irish ancestry, though estimates suggest that the true number of Scotch-Irish in the USA is more in the region of 27 million. Two possible reasons have been suggested for the disparity of the figures of the census and the estimation. The first is that Scots-Irish may quite often regard themselves as simply having either Irish ancestry (which 10.8% of Americans reported) or Scottish ancestry (reported by 4.9 million or 1.7% of the total population). The other is that most of the descendants of this historical group have integrated themselves into American society to such an extent that they, like English-Americans or German-Americans, do not feel the need to identify with their ancestors as strongly as perhaps the more recent Roman Catholic Irish-Americans.
[edit] See also
[edit] Scholarly sources
- Oscar Handlin, Ann Orlov and Stephan Thernstrom eds. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) the standard reference source for all ethnic groups.
- Rowland Tappan Berthoff. British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 (1953).
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