Discover

'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. Terms such as White American or European American are more common as a generic term within which those of British ancestry are included.
British Americans have English, Scottish, Scots-Irish (Ulster), and/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 Scots-Irish American)''.

Contents

British American or American?

Number of British Americans

Ancestry Groups 1980- Census

See also

References

Scholarly sources

External links

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 - for those with ancestry of older immigrant descent, it becomes increasingly irrelevant.
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.
Great Britain provided millions of immigrants to America after 1776. They typically assimilated quite rapidly.

Number of British Americans

In the 2000 US Census, 36.4 million Americans reported British ancestry.^[1] These include:

★ 24.5 million English

★ 4.9 million Scottish

★ 4.3 million Scots-Irish (Ulster)

★ 1.7 million Welsh

★ 1 million British (answered "British" as ancestry on the Census)

Ancestry Groups 1980- Census

★ 49,598,035 English

★ 10,048,816 Scottish

★ 1,664,598 Welsh
No figures for the Scots-Irish but they are estimated at 27 million . over half of the Irish in the United States are Protestants.[1]
These figures make British Americans 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 Irish are the largest self-reported ethnic groups in the nation.

See also

★ List of English Americans

★ List of Scottish Americans

★ List of Welsh Americans

★ List of Scots-Irish Americans

References

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:WJGw9z2RkkYJ:www.uen.org/Lessonplan/downloadFile.cgi%3Ffile%3D1041-6-15955-AF_Census_Data.pdf%26filename%3DAF_Census_Data.pdf+49,598,035&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk
1. United States 2000 Census, Ancestry: 2000

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).

★ David Hackett Fischer. ''Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways In America'' (1989).

External links

★ Census Bureau ancestry figures