Talk:Irish Americans/Archive 7

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This is an archive of past discussions about Irish Americans. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

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Cheverus High School

A discussion you may be interested in has begun at here. It regards whether Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine should be considered as part of the Irish American culture in Maine. Thank you for your input.--TM 13:57, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Stereotypes

Irish immigration section cleanup

@Jonathan f1: Here is are two lists of books that I own and mentioned previously may be of use to this project:

About the United States as a whole:

Leyburn, James G. (1962). The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0807842591. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Thernstrom, Stephan, ed. (1980). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674375123.
Sowell, Thomas (1981). Ethnic America: A History. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465020751.
Dolan, Jay P. (1985). The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385152068.
Miller, Kerby A. (1985). Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195035940.
Fischer, David Hackett (1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195069051.
Purvis, Thomas L. (1995). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Revolutionary America 1763 to 1800. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0816025282.
Shifflett, Crandall (1996). Victorian America: 1876 to 1913. New York: Facts on File. p. 84. ISBN 978-0816025312.
Glazier, Michael, ed. (1999). The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 978-0268027551.
Purvis, Thomas L. (1999). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Colonial America to 1763. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0816025275.
Miller, Kerby A.; Schrier, Arnold; Boling, Bruce D.; Doyle, David N. (2003). Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195045130.
Selcer, Richard F. (2006). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Civil War America: 1850 to 1875. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0816038671.

About individual states:

Rogers, William Warren; Ward, Robert David; Atkins, Leah Rawls; Flynt, Wayne (2018) [1994]. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (3rd ed.). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0817359171.
Naske, Claus-M.; Slotnick, Herman E. (2014) [1979]. Alaska: A History (3rd ed.). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806146669.
Sheridan, Thomas E. (2012). Arizona: A History (Revised ed.). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 978-0816506873.
Whayne, Jeannie M.; Deblack, Thomas A.; Sabo III, George; Arnold, Morris S. (2013) [2002]. Arkansas: A Narrative History (2nd ed.). Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1557289933.
Rolle, Andrew; Verge, Arthur C. (2015) [1963]. California: A History (8th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118701041.
Abbott, Carl; Leonard, Stephen J.; Noel, Thomas J. (2013) [1976]. Colorado: A History of the Centennial State (5th ed.). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. ISBN 978-1607322269.
Roth, David M. (1979). Connecticut: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393331745.
Risjord, Norman K. (2012). Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0803269293.
Munroe, John A. (2006) [1979]. History of Delaware (5th ed.). Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. ISBN 978-1611492934.
Gannon, Michael, ed. (2013) [1996]. The History of Florida. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813064017.
Coleman, Kenneth, ed. (1991) [1977]. A History of Georgia (2nd ed.). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820312699.
Haley, James L. (2014). Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1250070395.
Schwantes, Carlos A. (1991). In Mountain Shadows: A History of Idaho. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0803242135.
Biles, Roger (2005). Illinois: A History of the Land and Its People. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0875806044.
Schwieder, Dorothy (1996). Iowa: The Middle Land. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-1587295492.
Miner, Craig (2002). Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0700612154.
Klotter, James C.; Friend, Craig Thompson (2018) [1997]. A New History of Kentucky (2nd ed.). Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0813176307.
Cummins, Light Townsend; Schafer, Judith Kelleher; Haas, Edward F.; Kurtz, Michael L. (2014). Wall, Bennett H.; Rodrigue, John C. (eds.). Louisiana: A History (6th ed.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118619292.
Judd, Richard W.; Churchill, Edwin A.; Eastman, Joel W. (1995). Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present. Orono, ME: University of Maine Press. ISBN 978-0891010821.
Chapelle, Suzanne Ellery; Russo, Jean B.; Baker, Jean H.; Esslinger, Dean R.; Papenfuse, Edward C.; Schulz, Constance B.; Stiverson, Gregory A. Maryland: A History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1421426228.
Brown, Richard D.; Tager, Jack (2000). Massachusetts: A Concise History. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1558492493.
Dunbar, Willis F.; May, George S. (1995). Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (3rd revised ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 978-080287055-1.
Lass, William E. (1998) [1977]. Minnesota: A History (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393319712.
Busbee, Jr., Westley F. (2015) [2005]. Mississippi: A History (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118755907.
Parrish, William E.; Christensen, Lawrence O.; Lookingbill, Brad D. (2020) [1980]. Missouri: The Heart of the Nation (4th ed.). Hoboken,, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1119165859.
Malone, Michael P.; Roeder, Richard B.; Lang, William L. (1991). Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Revised ed.). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0295971292.
Naugle, Ronald C.; Montag, John J.; Olson, James C. History of Nebraska (4th ed.). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0803286269.
Green, Michael S. (2015). Nevada: A History of the Silver State. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. ISBN 978-0874179804.
Jager, Ronald; Jager, Grace (2000). The Granite State New Hampshire: An Illustrated History. American Historical Press. ISBN 978-1892724151.
Lurie, Maxine N.; Veit, Richard F., eds. (2018) [2012]. New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (Reprint ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0813599168.
Sánchez, Joseph P.; Spude, Robert L.; Gómez, Art (2013). New Mexico: A History. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806142562.
Klein, Milton M., ed. (2005). The Empire State: A History of New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0801489914.
Ready, Milton (2005). The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1570035913.
Kern, Kevin F.; Wilson, Gregory S. (2014). Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118548431.
Baird, W. David; Goble, Danney (2008). Oklahoma: A History. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806141978.
Dodds, Gordon B. (1977). Oregon: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393334364.
Miller, Randall M.; Pencak, William, eds. (2002). Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0271022147.
McLoughlin, William G. (1986) [1978]. Rhode Island: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393302714.
Edgar, Walter (1998). South Carolina: A History. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1570032554.
Bergeron, Paul H.; Ash, Stephen V.; Keith, Jeanette (1999). Tennesseans and Their History. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-1572330566.
Calvert, Robert A.; De León, Arnoldo; Cantrell, Gregg (2014) [1990]. The History of Texas (5th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1118617731.
May, Dean L. (1987). Utah: A People's History. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-0874802849.
Klyza, Christopher McGrory; Trombulak, Stephen C. The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History (2nd ed.). University Press of New England. ISBN 978-1611684025.
Heinemann, Ronald L.; Kolp, John G.; Parent Jr., Anthony S.; Shade, William G. Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607–2007. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0813927695.
Ritter, Harry (2018). Washington's History: The People, Land, and Events of the Far Northwest (Revised ed.). Berkeley, CA: WestWinds Press. ISBN 978-1513261775.
Lewis, Tom (2015). Washington: A History of Our National City. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465039210.
Rice, Otis K.; Brown, Stephen W. (1993) [1985]. West Virginia: A History (2nd ed.). Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0813118543.
Nesbit, Robert C.; Thompson, William F. (1989). Wisconsin: A History (2nd ed.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0299108045.
Larson, T. A. (1990). History of Wyoming (2nd revised ed.). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0803279360.

Like I've said before, some of these books may be older but the WP:Reliable sources policy does not stipulate that the age of a reference makes it unreliable; it is only unreliable if it's claims has superseded by a subsequent reference. While the state histories and the books about the United States in the aggregate may not have direct references about Irish immigration to the United States, they do have information about settlement of the individual states and other population statistics that can be used to delineate migration patterns. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:40, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Like I also mentioned before, I also live in Massachusetts and have a library card at the Boston Public Library. The BPL has copies of Jay Dolan's The Irish Americans: A History, The Plantation of Ulster by Philip S. Robinson, and The Concise History of Ireland by Sean Duffy. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 20:25, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: Actually the age of the source does matter. On WP:Reliable sources you will find the following warning,

"Especially in scientific and academic fields, older sources may be inaccurate because new information has been brought to light, new theories proposed, or vocabulary changed."

Yes, it says to check that information has "not been superseded", but that's a lot of work for nothing. If there's anything important mentioned in a dated source, newer research will reference it. Right now I'm inclined to rule out Leyburn's 1962 Scotch-Irish study. I also still maintain that Albion's Seed is not reliable for history. AS is not only dated, but it was not well received by historians at the time (Fischer spent the better part of a decade trying to defend is work, which is usually what happens when a scholar goes "all-in" on a fringe thesis).

Also take notice of the following instruction:

"The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content. Sources should directly support the information as it is presented in the Wikipedia article."

That's to say, these sources need to address the subject being discussed in an explicit fashion. That's why the Pew Research report on inter-denominational marriages was unreliable -- the study had nothing to do with whether or not Irish Catholic Americans were intermarrying with Protestant Americans.

Which brings me to my next point: those state history books you cited will not suffice for this article. If any author of state histories is reliable for the content we are dealing with here, he/she will be referenced by subject experts in an RS. What we want to do is compile a list of secondary sources by scholars who have published in the field of "Irish diaspora studies" (a well established subset of history). Kerby Miller and Patrick Griffin are two examples of subject matter experts in this domain. On sections having to do with religion, Michael P. Carroll, whom you've been referencing, does have expertise in this department. His chapter How the Irish Became Protestant in America is good enough for me. Reginald Byron was a cultural anthropologist and expert in migration who frequently published on migration from Ireland to North America (he published one large monograph and numerous papers on Irish-American social and cultural history), and can be used to balance some of Miller's more controversial arguments. For regions outside of the Northeast, I would advise against Miller here, as he rarely focuses on the South or West in his work. Scholars D.T. Gleeson and D.M. Emmons have dealt with these subjects (The Irish in the South, 1815 -1877, by Gleeson; and Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845 -1919, by Emmons).

The rest of your sources look okay.Jonathan f1 (talk) 20:36, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: I forgot to add -- Thomas Sowell is not an RS. He is/was an economist with no credentials in any field of history.Jonathan f1 (talk) 03:05, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: I was willing to assist with this project and now I'm not. The state histories were written by historians and contain information related to their settlement. In more than one of them, they note that most of the settlers were native-born citizens not immigrants. In the case of Missouri, the authors note that most of its settlers came from regions that Kerby Miller demonstrated in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan to have substantial Scots-Irish populations in 1790. I'm sure you'd find a problem with any source that I bring forward doesn't reinforce your assumptions, because you still seem to me to be determined to obscure the entire history of a group of people. As a member of the group whose history you seem to me to be intent on obscuring, I'm not willing to assist you in that purpose. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 15:09, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: I told you several times that this is not an article about the Scots-Irish. And you are doing nothing to benefit your case that you're merely an innocent, dispassionate editor looking to improve this article and not someone trying to push a point of view.

Please read WP:Reliable sources again and pay close attention to the subsection on context:

"Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content. In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication. Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source that is not related to the principal topics of the publication may not be reliable; editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible."

There are several reasons why using state histories as sources for articles/sections on Irish immigrant history is problematic. For example, in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, on pages 80 -81 in the chapter "Scotch-Irish" Myths and "Irish Identities", Kerby Miller writes,

"Furthermore, during the mid- and late 19th Century, the term "Scotch-Irish" broadened in America beyond its narrow, initial associations with Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish descent."

He goes on to say:

"Thus, by the early 20th Century, the authors of county histories as far afield as South Carolina and South Dakota were happily rebaptizing as "Scotch-Irish" the ancestors of respectable Methodist ministers and Baptist farmers who had embarrassingly "native Irish" names such as O'Hara and O'Brien."

What he's saying is that by the late 19th Century the term "Scots-Irish" came to define not just Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish origin, but also Irish-American Protestants who were of Gaelic or Hiberno-Norman descent. Authors of state histories, who typically defer to county historians for primary source material, would not know this because, unlike Miller, they are not subject-matter experts researching Irish immigration and scrutinizing minutiae related to ancestral origins or the changing boundaries of ethnic identities. If they even go into any detail on the origins of state settlers at all, it is usually done so in passing. And furthermore, using one source that says "state A's settlers came from region B", and then another source which says "settlers from region B were Scots-Irish", to conclude that "state A's settlers were Scots-Irish", is a violation of Wikipedia's proscription of original research.

In summary:

Leyburn - not reliable (the source is dated, and the subject of the source is the Scots-Irish, which is treated as a separate ancestry group on Wikipedia)

Thomas Sowell - not reliable (an economist who has no credentials or experience in historical research)

Jim Webb - not reliable (a layman who has no training in research history; also off-topic and fringe)

Albion's Seed - not reliable (dated, fringe, and also off-topic)

You've got other sources that deal with "Colonial America", "Victorian America", and "the Civil War", which I imagine have little to do with Irish immigration or Irish immigrants.

State histories - not reliable (not dealing specifically with the subject of this article - if there's anything interesting, credible and reliable published about Irish immigrants in a state history book, at least one of the several historians who research Irish-American history professionally will have referenced it in his/her work)

Furthermore, there is at least one edit you've made to this article that manipulated the language used in a reliable source (Kerby Miller). Specifically,

"In the 18th-century Thirteen Colonies and the independent United States, while interethnic marriage among Catholics remained a dominant pattern, Catholic-Protestant intermarriage became more common (notably in the Shenandoah Valley where intermarriage among Ulster Protestants and the small number of Irish Catholics in particular was not uncommon or stigmatized),"

That's not what Miller said. Miller said that intermarriage among Ulster Protestants and a significant minority of Irish Catholics was common in the Shenandoah Valley in the 18th Century. A "significant minority" does not mean a "small number". It very much means the opposite of that.

So again, there is a troubling pattern to your edits and your reliance on sources that are either outside the scope of this article or were published by amateurs. I told you a few of the sources you cited looked okay to me. I also provided you with some suggestions of sources that were published by subject experts and focused specifically on the kind of content we'd want to cover in this article. It's up to you if you want to help improve this article or continue to flout RS rules, violate OR prohibitions, and use this page to promote a separate ancestry group which you feel is under siege. Jonathan f1 (talk) 00:57, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: I apologize for misquoting Miller's New Perspectives, but as your direct quotation of Miller points out, the Irish and Scots-Irish identities are not mutually exclusive. I'd forgotten that he'd pointed this out in the source, but this seems to me like a strong justification for just merging the Irish Americans and Scotch-Irish Americans articles and which I would have no objection to. I would also note that you suggested merging the Irish and Scots-Irish articles in a previous thread but now seem to be opposed to doing, but if you agreed to merging them, I would go back to being willing to participate in cleaning up the articles.

I accept your correction on the WP:Reliable sources policy, but I would argue that the state histories don't violate it and are needed because The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America entries on individual states and cities are often very brief and don't always have the kind of quantitative detail that some of the state histories do have on Irish and Scots-Irish immigration and settlement in the individual states and that I think would be needed to delineate in the kind of detail the regional variations in the migrations both to the United States and within the United States that I mentioned in the previous thread.

I apologize for my previous comment but I am not attempting to use this article "to promote a separate ancestry group which [I] feel is under siege"; I am just saying that I think your understanding of the WP:Reliable sources policy is more restrictive than is necessary and to a point where it would be counterproductive to improving the article, and are being dismissive of the sources I've provided as being unreliable even though they are written by professional historians and which have quantitative detail that is about Irish and Scots-Irish Americans that could be of use to the article. I would also like to apologize more generally for any other previous suggestions on my part of bad faith motivations to you. I'm just tired of people saying that I don't even exist and do so by citing research that appears to be writing my very existence out of the historical record. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 20:26, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

I would also add that I think that part of the growing class divide in the United States is over a lack of a mutual understanding of topics like this, and if this article could be improved it could help to alleviate part of it. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 20:53, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: I think I would oppose merging the Irish Americans and Scotch Irish Americans articles into one. Though some overlapp in the two identities seems to have ocurred in some cases, in the main/overall the two groups (descendants of the English/Lowland Scottish descendants and the Native/Gaelic Irish) seem to have been culturally and ethnically distinct in their origins and with their own distinct histories. Also, though the two groups may have intermarried at times (this seems not to have been very common and), the cultural influence and ancestry of the "Scotch-Irish" (originally largely of Lowland Scottish and Northern English descent) does remain significant (sometimes predominant) in areas of the US (such as much of Appalachia and parts of the backcounty/Deep South, where Native Irish migration was generally fairly low.) and they do seem to have retained some degree of distinctiveness and cultural continuity in some regions. The Scottish/Northern English descendants coming from Ireland represented a dispora a group with a distinct culture from the natives of Ireland (especially since most of the Scottish migrants came from the Lowlands/South, where there was generally little history of Gaelic settlement). The "Scotch-Irish Americans" article is fairly substantial and detailed (and a notable topic on its own), and the topic, to me seems to merit its own article. (In addition, several other articles, in relevant places, link to "Scotch-Irish Americans.)

Similarly, it seems to me that one would likely prefer to maintain separate articles for immigrant groups deriving from the same country but who nonetheless have different ancestral and cultural origins (such as Russian, Polish, or any group of Eastern European Americans on the one hand, and Romani (so-called "Gypsy") or Jewish Americans on the other hand who also hailed/immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe but had a distict culture/origin deriving elswhere). One could conversely make a case for merging "Scotch-Irish Americans" with "British Americans" (or "Scottish Americans" or perhaps even "English Americans") because they are/were a group of predominantly British origin, who carried a culture derived mainly from a certain area of Britain (thus treating them more as a subset of the British/British-American diaspora). However, I think the topic of "Scotch-Irish Americans" is distinct and notable enough to justify its own aricle separate from both "British Americans" and "Irish Americans" (thogh related_cpnnected to both), and separate from the other topics/pages mentioned (though it may be treated/mentioned in a due manner, and in some cases is, as a sub-topic on/within any of those pages). Skllagyook (talk) 22:07, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: I agree that the Scots-Irish and Irish American pages should be merged as one. It's obvious from a review of the recent and relevant literature that scholars reject the "two traditions" hypothesis of the Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics, in both Northern Ireland and America. However, you and I can not make that decision ourselves. Merging these pages will require us to obtain a fairly broad consensus, and that'll be an uphill fight (to say the least).

As far as your state history books go - I'll make a compromise with you.

Let's first review some of the more reliable sources (sources specifically focused on the topics/sections of this article and published by specialists) and see what they have to say about the regional trends in Irish -American immigration and how IA cultural, political, and social processes differed by region. One of the many problems with this article is that it treats "Irish American" history and culture as an homogenous experience, and that's not accurate. For example, nothing has been said about assimilation processes for Irish immigrants, let alone how assimilation rates differed by region. That would add a new layer of depth to an article that's currently rather shallow in content. I think readers would be more interested in information that goes beyond the same tired clichés about Irish immigrants that you can find on pretty much every website that deals with this subject.

After having gone through all the reliable sources, if there is still material we feel this article should cover, we can then take a look at your state history books. Wiki's RS policy instructs us to rely primarily on topic-specific sources "where possible", which means we are permitted to use an off-topic RS to cover salient information that hasn't been sufficiently dealt with in more authoritative references.Jonathan f1 (talk) 00:17, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: I actually agree with CommonKnowledgeCreator on this one. The "two traditions" hypothesis of the Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics ("Protestant vs Catholic", or what Kerby Miller described as "inflexible adherents of two eternally separate and distinct historical traditions") has been universally discarded by contemporary scholars. Scholars of Irish Studies, cultural anthropologists who study Irish migration, and even religion specialists who research Catholicism and Protestantism in the US, have all challenged this thesis and agree it's inaccurate and misleading. See, for example, "Scots-Irish" Myths and "Irish" Identities in Eighteenth- And Nineteenth- Century America, by Kerby Miller; Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class and Transatlantic Migration, also by Miller; and How the Irish Became Protestant in America, by religion scholar Michael P. Carroll, to name a few.

"Similarly, it seems to me that one would likely prefer to maintain separate articles for immigrant groups deriving from the same country but who nonetheless have different ancestral and cultural origins (such as Russian, Polish, or any group of Eastern European Americans on the one hand, and Romany or Jewish Americans on the other hand who also hailed/immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe but had a distict culture/origin deriving elswhere)."

Except the groups you reference came from balkanized regions of Europe where there actually were "different ancestral and cultural" origins of national populations, while the Scots-Irish (American descendants of Ulster Presbyterians) and Irish Catholics both descended from "dissenter" and "papist" ancestors in Ireland who, in the 18th Century, had more in common than not. For one, scholars have only located a handful of instances where Irish-American Protestants were even referred to as "Scots-Irish" prior to the 19th Century, either by themselves or outsiders. More common were descriptions as "northern dissenters", "Northern Irish", "Protestant Irish", and most often just "Irish". Secondly, while it was previously believed that the resurrection of the 'Scots-Irish' designation had something to do with a desire by Irish-American Protestants to differentiate themselves from poor, Catholic famine immigrants, Miller challenges this view and posits that Scots-Irish identity emerged as a much earlier phenomenon (pre-dating the Famine) and was likely the result of the sectarian fallout from the 1798 United Irish Rebellion and the subsequent ethnoreligious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. However, even within a heightened climate of sectarianism, "ethnic" identity was not a derivative of "ancestral" or "cultural" origins, but rather political and religious affiliations which had grown inextricable by the time of The Great Hunger (Protestant and Unionist vs Catholic and Nationalist). It was likely the case that, as this political climate intensified, Irish immigrants, both Protestant and Catholic, transmitted these divisions across the Atlantic.

On page 80 of "Scots-Irish" Myths and "Irish" Identities in Eighteenth- And Nineteenth- Century America, Miller writes:

"Furthermore, during the mid- and late nineteenth century, the term "Scotch-Irish" broadened in America beyond its narrow, initial associations with Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish descent. American historians have rarely explored or fully understood how this expansion happened, but surely it was associated with the dilution of Protestant denominational boundaries wrought by evangelicalism in both Ireland and America, and, in Ireland, the emergence of a pan-Protestant political bloc in opposition to Irish Catholic nationalism. Again, possible transatlantic linkages -- such as between American and Irish revivalism, between anti-Catholic movements on both sides of the ocean, and with the parallel development of the Scotch-Irish Congresses in the United States and Ulster unionism in the north of Ireland -- deserve investigation. In any event, the consequence by the late 1800s was that the group designated as "Scotch-Irish" had expanded to include not only Americans of Scottish Presbyterian descent but also those of Irish Anglican, Quaker, or other Protestant antecedents (although most of the latter were of English -- not Scottish -- origins, and their ancestors often hailed from southern Ireland), as well as all those of Gaelic Irish or Hiberno-Norman descent who were currently not Catholic."

He goes on to say,

"Ironically, by making the "Scotch-Irish" group more inclusive, its eulogists undermined the basic premise of the group "Myth" and demonstrated that the development of "Scotch-Irish" identity was not the inevitable consequence of permanent conflicts between the inflexible adherents of two eternally separate and distinct historical traditions."

The inclusion of Protestant Americans of Gaelic and Norman-Irish descent into the "Scotch-Irish" fold proves that ancestral origins and "separated" cultures were not responsible for the emergence of this identity. Rather, it was Irish Catholic nationalism, on both sides of the Atlantic, that gave rise to what Miller calls a "pan-Protestant" bloc in America and Ireland.

"One could conversely make a case for merging "Scotch-Irish Americans" with "British Americans" (or "Scottish Americans" or perhaps even "English Americans") because they are/were a group of predominantly British origin, who carried a culture derived mainly from a certain area of Britain."

Patrick Griffin, professor of history and the director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame, makes it clear in The People with no Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the creation of a British Atlantic World, 1680 -1764, that the "Scots-Irish" were not Scottish, not English, and not British. The title of his book, "The People with No Name", alludes to the fact that the "Scots-Irish" had about a half dozen different designations, wore all of them and none of them at the same time, and nearly disappeared into history without a trace were it not for the Irish Protestant revivalist movements of the late 19th Century (which, as America's centennial approached, coincided with various other quests for national origins myths).

Having said all that, I am not going to pursue a merger of these pages because I don't think one is achievable by editorial consensus. However, I do want to get it on the record, at least on this talk page, that the separation of the "Scots-Irish Americans" and "Irish Americans" pages by Wikipedia editors is not consistent with how contemporary scholars study these groups.Jonathan f1 (talk) 03:37, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "Let's first review some ... deals with this subject." I don't think any content about assimilation should be included in the immigration section at all and should instead be reserved for the social history section, which I would also argue we should not attempt to clean up until the immigration section is cleaned up. While correcting stereotypes is appropriate, it is not relevant to the immigration section. The only content other than migration and other population statistics should be qualitative information that explains some of the historical factors related to the migrations (e.g. the various colonial laws related to Catholic disenfranchisement, the 1690s laws limiting Irish Catholic indentured servant migration, the socioeconomic/political conditions in Ireland causing the migrations, and so on). While the WP:Reliable sources policy says "editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible", unless the sources you've cited mention these things, I would argue that this is why the state histories and the Facts on File encyclopedias are still needed because they have some of that information. As a side note, considering that the article is continuing to be vandalized, I'd recommend that we find an administrator to put either extended-confirmed protection or at least semi-protection on the article. (I had a similar problem when I wrote most of the content in the 2020 stock market crash article.)

@Skllagyook: Though I agree with most of what you've said, the reason why I think they should be merged is because, beginning in the 1970s, survey data (in Michael Carroll's article cited in the current revision of the article) has found consistent majorities or pluralities of self-identified Irish Americans also self-identifying as being Protestant. This does not imply that all of these people are Scots-Irish, but (and this is the point of contention between Jonathan f1 and myself that initiated this dispute) presumably some of them are as Carroll's article suggests and that's why I think it is necessary to merge the articles and delineate migration from Ireland as a whole quantitatively with sections indicating local variations in the migration to the United States and within the United States by Protestant emigrants from Ireland and Catholic emigrants from Ireland within the four broad regions of the United States and state-by-state as much as possible. The social history section in the article can document whatever cultural differences existed and remain once the immigration section is cleaned up. Additionally, if you know of any other reliable sources that could be used for this project or editors who know anything about this topic and could contribute, please let them know. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 04:15, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: You wrote: "For one, scholars have only located a handful of instances where Irish-American Protestants were even referred to as "Scots-Irish" prior to the 19th Century, either by themselves or outsiders."

I understand and agree that the term might not have been in common use before that time, but is does seem that a group nonetheless existed consisting largely of the descendants of "British" (mainly Lowland Scottish and Northern English) settlers in Ireland, whose culture later went on to make an impact in certain regions of America, which that term tended to describe. And it would not seem that the use of the term "Irish" by this group would necessarily indicate that they were of native Irish origin (any more than the designation "American" or "Australian" or South African "Afrikaner" for people of European descent established in those areas implies that they are of indigenous American, Australian, or African origin), but rather that they had arrived from and lived (in some cases for generations) in Ireland and may have come to identify themselves by the name of the country (at a time when Native Irish people were relatively few in what is now the US, and where there would have been little need for the "Scotch-Irish" to distinguish themselves from them prior to that). The arrival later of large number of Native Irish (many of then Catholic) might have lead the descendants of Irish migrants of Scottish descent to use new terms to distinguish themselves from the new arrivals (which whom they differed culturally).

You wrote: "Except the groups you reference came from balkanized regions of Europe where there actually were "different ancestral and cultural" origins of national populations, while the Scots-Irish (American descendants of Ulster Presbyterians) and Irish Catholics both descended from "dissenter" and "papist" ancestors in Ireland who, in the 18th Century, had more in common than not."

I'm not sure I understand this statement. As far as I know, this was not the case. The "Scots-Irish" (American descendants of Ulster Presbyterians, as well as of Protestant migrants of other Sects to Northern Ireland from Scotland and England) and the Irish Catholics would not have (by and large) shared the same origins, certainly not in the 18th century when there was little intermarriage between the two groups. The latter (the Irish Catholic population, both in Ireland and America) were mainly derived from the majority native Gaelic (Goidelic/historically Gaelic-speaking) ethnicity of Ireland - the Native Irish. While the former (the so-called "Scots-Irish" and other Protestants from Ulster) tended to descend from Lowland Scots and Northern English settlers - and perhaps sometimes those from elsewhere in England and Britain (since in that period, Protestantism was brought to Ireland mainly by migration rather than proselytization) who typically had come from regions in Britain with a mostly mixed British-Celtic (i.e. Brythonic) and Anglo-Saxon ancestral makeup (this also includes much of the Scottish Lowlands) rather than a Gaelic one (except for the minority who came from the Scottish Highlands and nearby) and traditionally spoke variants of Scots and English, both derived from Anglo-Saxon/Old English (and the region including the far north of England and the south Scottish Lowlands shared many cultural features/traits of regional culture - e.g. aspects of dialect - which would have been shared by people of different religious sects, both Presbyterian and non-Presbyterian). This would seem to be true (at least much of the time) even if it is the case that the numbers of those claimed to be "Scotch-Irish" were inflated in later periods of American history with the descendants of Native Irish converts to Protestantism and and the descendants of British settlers to Ireland (e.g. non-Northern English, Welsh, etc.) who had come from other regions of Britain.

I also understand and agree that term "Scotch-Irish" may not be perfect or strictly accurate in describing this group and the full range of peoples who settled in Ulster/Northern Ireland, who were not an entirely homogenous group (as the name could perhaps be perceived to imply), since they included, not only Presbyterians but also the descendants of British migrants of other Protestant sects, and Northern English as well as Scottish (something like "Anglo-Scots-Irish" would, in my opinion, be more strictly accurate), and may, as your source suggests have been expanded somewhat beyond its original designation in later times (for some of the reasons you describe). But it seems that the term is a widely known/notable one that broadly describes a real existing migration of people who came to America from Ireland (mostly in the 18th century) but were of mostly of non-Native-Irish origin (often but not always Scottish, and many of whom did derive from a certain region of Britain) and different in origin from the Native Irish, and who became a significant element in the American ethnic makeup (in some regions more so).Skllagyook (talk) 05:07, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: Something else that just occurred to me: your reference to Miller on page 4 of Irish Immigrants states "... the approximately four hundred thousand emigrants from Ireland who settled in North America between the late 1600s and the end of the Napoleonic [Wars] in 1815. ... Finally, perhaps two-thirds of these early immigrants were males, and before the American Revolution a large number emigrated as indentured servants." Dolan's The American Catholic Experience on page 129 states, "Before the 1830s the typical emigrant was a Protestant farm laborer who traveled to the United States as part of a family group." Your reference to Miller is referring to Irish immigration to North America as a whole in the 18th century, not to the Thirteen Colonies and independent United States in particular in the 18th century, while Dolan's is. Similar to your reference in a previous thread to Miller's Irish Immigrants on page 39, Miller is referring to Irish immigration to the North America as a whole, not the United States in particular. I've placed a hold on Dolan's The Irish Americans: A History (2008) as it has a chapter on this period as well. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 05:16, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: I'm not sure I agree. But I will have to give some thought to your reasoning and will try to get back to you regarding that here on the Talk page. In then case of a merger of the two, would you also propose remming the merged article? And if so, what? The name "Irish Americans" seems to indicate the the article is about Americans of ethnic Irish descent (I think that would be the general assumption/expectation of the general reader, and not unreasonably so). Including the "Scotch-Irish" in such an article would be misleading and inaccurate (and seem to misleadingly downplay their distinct origins). However, to merge the two and rename the merged article something less ethnically specific (I can't think of what) would also not seem to me to be an improvement, as the topic of Irish Americans (Americans of ethnic Irish/Native Irish descent) specifically is also a very notable topic which seems to merit the focus of an article of its own.Skllagyook (talk) 05:20, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: Good catch. I'll take a look at this and respond to you guys in the morning (it's 1 30 AM here). It's crucial that we get some kind of understanding of the number or the range scholars typically work with in describing migration from Ireland to the colonies. I've seen numbers as low as 100,000 for the colonial period (prior to the Revolution) and as high as 400,000 for the entire period until the turn of the 19th Century. D.T. Gleeson cited Miller in "The Irish in the South" and claimed 400,000 Irish migrants for the period, 100,000 of whom were Irish Catholics (Protestant converts).Jonathan f1 (talk) 05:26, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: Okay, so Miller uses "North America" a lot as a synonym for the British territories of what's now the United States and Canada, before these two countries existed. I don't see how this supports Dolan's assertion, though. For one, there wasn't a lot of traffic from Ulster to the Canadian colonies; the first significant wave came in the 1760s, and was largely confined to Nova Scotia. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that colonial emigrants from Ireland (to the 13 colonies) were mostly male and many, if not most, came over as indentured servants.

The reason why these pages should be merged is simply because they've been separated on the assumption that the Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics were "two cultures", "two histories", and "two traditions", a belief most scholars now view as erroneous. And in any event, the fact that majorities or pluralities of self-identifying Irish Americans also self-identify as Protestant is concomitant to the more central point that these were not, in fact, two "eternally separate" and impermeable ethnic groups, but rather bolsters Miller's argument that the emergence of "Scots-Irish" identity in 19th Century America was more or less an organized reaction to Irish nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic. As "Fenian" politics disappeared in America, particularly after Irish independence, so, too, did artificial divisions between Protestant and Catholic Irish Americans. In other words, regardless of whether contemporary Irish-American Protestants descended from 18th Century Ulster Protestants or Famine and post-Famine Irish Catholics, the simple fact that so many Irish Americans are also identifying themselves as Protestant suggests that being "Irish" and being "Protestant" in America are no longer mutually exclusive identities.Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:16, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skallagyook: Miller did reference Leyburn's 1962 claim that the designation "Scotch-Irish" can be useful in describing a "historical reality" (that Ulster Protestants of mainly Scottish origins dominated 18th Century migration from Ireland to North America), but also warns that even limiting the Scots-Irish descriptor to Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish descent homogenizes a "complex reality". Depending on when they arrived in Ulster and which variety of Presbyterianism they subscribed to, Miller identified important differences within a group that wasn't even really a group, but rather a variety of groups that arrived in Ulster from different regions of Scotland at different periods of time and adhered to different doctrines within Presbyterianism, to say nothing of the fact that, throughout the 18th Century, different groups within this group that wasn't even really a group migrated to America at different times which further compounded their differences as different waves of settlers in the American colonies. That's to say, the closer you examine the 18th Century Scots-Irish under the microscope, the more their differences become apparent and seemingly endless.

But you're missing the forest for the trees. As Patrick Griffin has argued, despite that many Ulster Presbyterian ministers were educated in the west of Scotland, the Scots-Irish were not viewed as Scottish either in Ulster, Scotland, or North America by settlers of Scottish descent. They had a distinctly "Irish" flavor about them that both the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania got a good taste of. They would've had more in common with the minority of Irish Catholics in the colonies than any of these other Protestant groups. Furthermore, by the 19th Century, the group that became known as the 'Scots-Irish' also grew to include Protestant Americans of Gaelic and Norman-Irish descent, further complicating matters.Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:54, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: You wrote: "As Patrick Griffin has argued, despite that many Ulster Presbyterian ministers were educated in the west of Scotland, the Scots-Irish were not viewed as Scottish either in Ulster, Scotland, or North America by settlers of Scottish descent. They had a distinctly "Irish" flavor about them that both the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania got a good taste of."

I would be interested to see a reference for that. It seems like a somewhat broad generalization and perhaps kind of subjective. How does one define an "Irish flavor", and compared to what? Even if true that they were somewhat different from people still in Britain, it would not be surprising if they had become somewhat distinct from people in or directly from Scotland, given their time in Ireland. I never argued that they were identical in every way culturally to those back in Britain (this happens sometimes to diaspora populations; cultures evolve). And it would not imply that they were not also very distinct from the Native Irish; they would in fact have been very distinct from them an various ways, not only in religion but also in the fact that they were (mainly) of non-Gaelic origin, had mostly never spoken Gaelic, and derived from different ethnic roots. It might possibly be surprising if the Ulster Protestants of Scotish origin were not viewed as similar by at least some people from the Scottish Lowlands (it should be remembered that they were mostly of Lowland, not Highland Scottish, origin and would not be expected to be very similar to Highlanders or their descendants nor to people of largely Southern English, Eastern English, or other non-Northern English origin such as the Puritans).

You wrote: "They would've had more in common with the minority of Irish Catholics in the colonies than any of these other Protestant groups."

This also seems very broad and somewhat questionable, since, by and large, they did not share a common ethnic origin with the Native Irish (and in many cases, at that time, would have spoken different native languages). It might depend of which Protestant groups one compared them to. Generally they (the "Scotch-Irish") would been likely to have more in common with migrants to America from Lowland Scotland or far Northern England, if such people were then present in America in large numbers (likely more in common with them than with with Highland Scots, Southwestern English, Southeastern English peoples, or perhaps people from other non-far-Northern areas of England, all of which were also well represented in the American colonies - varying regionally, or with the Native Irish)

You wrote: "but also warns that even limiting the Scots-Irish descriptor to Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish descent homogenizes a "complex reality". Depending on when they arrived in Ulster and which variety of Presbyterianism they subscribed to, Miller identified important differences within a group that wasn't even really a group, but rather a variety of groups that arrived in Ulster from different regions of Scotland at different periods of time and adhered to different doctrines within Presbyterianism, to say nothing of the fact that, throughout the 18th Century, different groups within this group that wasn't even really a group migrated to America at different times which further compounded their differences as different waves of settlers in the American colonies."

I acknowledge that the reality is more complex than a single wave of Presbyterians migrating within a single short time frame. But the term can also describe groups other than Presbyterians (though they made up a significant proportion). I don't think that it is required for them to have been an entirely homogenous group who moved only in one single migration for the term to accurately describe them (or at least the bulk of them). The fact remains that a population of migrants came to America from Ireland (mostly in the 18th century) most of whose ancestors had previously migrated to Ireland from areas of Scotland and England (in which the Scottish South and English far North and were most strongly represented), not all had necessarily come to Ireland within a certain migration wave or from a certain region of Britain but many did. The term "Scotch-Irish", whatever its origin, does seem to accurately describe most of the group (or groups) Miller lists (and is a widely known and notable term). Other common terms/labels for other immigrant-descended groups ("Irish-American", "German-American". "Jewish-American', "English-American", etc.), that also have articles here on Wikipedia, also could be said to include/cover (and in fact do) a wide range of diversity and variation (different migration waves at different times, cultural and regional subgroups/"sub-ethnic" identities, different religious sects, etc.), but all can be said to accurately describe (for the most part) the groups and people included under each of them. Perhaps one idea/possible solution might be to add more information - and nuance (to pages such as this one an/or the "Scotch-Irish Americans" page) regarding the variation that existed among this population (Miller perhaps being one possible source).Skllagyook (talk) 20:38, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: If you can't access Griffin's The People with no Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the creation of a British Atlantic World, 1680 -1764,^[1] here is a review of the book which summarizes the topic I covered.^[2]

"The Ulster men and women who are the subject of this study called themselves various names, including Irish, which they were, among other things, but what his book shows with insight and economy is that they always qualified their own definitions with others, usually equally valid. They were Presbyterians, not Papists, nor were they those Irish people who constituted the exclusive political nation of eighteenth-century Ireland--members of the Anglican established Church of Ireland. They had close connections with the west of Scotland where many of their clergy went for university education, but they were not Scots.

Governor Patrick Gordon, both parts of whose name indicate roots in the North East shoulder of Scotland, clearly did not deem the immigrants from Ulster fellow Scots."

"This also seems very broad and somewhat questionable, since, by and large, they did not share a common ethnic origin with the Native Irish (and in many cases, at that time, would have spoken different native languages)."

Yes, but I specified the "minority of Irish Catholics in the colonies", who did not speak Irish Gaelic but in fact lost both their native tongue and religion. The fact that colonists were identifying Ulster Presbyterians as 'Irish' and not "Scots-Irish", "Ulster Scots", or Scots anything, as described in reliable sources, should be enough to put this issue to bed. The challenge to the "two traditions" thesis is not that there were no differences between Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Catholics (there were, and in many cases profound ones), but rather that their differences paled in comparison to the differences the both of these "groups" had with American colonists who were not Irish either by birth or descent, including non-Irish colonists of Scottish and/or Borderland ancestry.Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:19, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: You wrote:"Governor Patrick Gordon, both parts of whose name indicate roots in the North East shoulder of Scotland, clearly did not deem the immigrants from Ulster fellow Scots."

I am afraid I don't really understand how the opinion of one Scot (who came, by the way, it would seem, from the Northeast of Scotland rather than the Lowlands) or even more than one, would negate the fact that the Protestant Ulstermen were a distinct group of Scottish origin (by and large they would still have spoken forms of Scots and English for instance, and Scots is still spoken in a substantial region of Ulster - or was until recently). It is not necessary for them to have been the same as those directly from Scotland (or elsewhere in Britain), or entirely devoid of Native Irish influence, for them to have been their own group sufficiently distinct from the Native Irish to merit their own page where their history can be discussed in due detail.

Your write: "...but I specified the "minority of Irish Catholics in the colonies", who did not speak Irish Gaelic but in fact lost both their native tongue and religion. The fact that colonists were identifying Ulster Presbyterians as 'Irish' and not "Scots-Irish", "Ulster Scots", or Scots anything, as described in reliable sources, should be enough to put this issue to bed. The challenge to the "two traditions" thesis is not that there were no differences between Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Catholics (there were, and in many cases profound ones), but rather that their differences paled in comparison to the differences the both of these "groups" had with American colonists who were not Irish either by birth or descent, including non-Irish colonists of Scottish and/or Borderland ancestry."

They were clearly very distinct form the Native peoples of Ireland (most of whom were Catholic and of Gaelic ethnicity). In the 18th century, Irish migrants of Gaelic descent were a small group in the colonies (of what are now the US). If those present had lost their language and religion (and were assimilated to the majority Protestant and Anglo-Saxon-derived culture/cultures of the colonies in which they lived), they would seemingly serve as a poor example of Native Irish or Irish Catholic culture/people with which to compare the Ulster Protestant migrants. The contention seems to be whether the "Scotch-Irish" are a distinct enough group to merit their own page outside of that covering "Irish Americans". It seems to me fairly clear that they are. And I do not see evidence that they did not constitute a different cultural "tradition" to that of the Native Irish. I should seem that "Irish-Americans" (which is generally understood as an ethnic designation) should be (primarily) focused of Americans of ethnic Irish (which is the say Gaelic) descent (and their history, etc.). it seems to me that there is a utility and appropriateness in also including a page focused on Americans descended from migrants from Ireland of Scottish/Engish origin, who have had a strong impact of areas of the US, and clearly have enough cultural uniqueness and notability to justify one.Skllagyook (talk) 21:55, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: But it's not just about Patrick Gordon (governor). Patrick Gordon was just one example used in a review of an RS to illustrate the fact that Pennsylvanians did not consider Ulster Presbyterians as "Scottish". I also don't know what Patrick Gordon's ancestral origins have to do with his assessment, as if he's any less Scottish on account of his ancestors coming from a region outside the Borderlands, or incapable of identifying Lowland Scots on that same measure. Patrick Gordon was immersed in the culture of colonial Pennsylvania, and knew very well that the Ulster Presbyterian settlers differed in significant ways from the colony's earlier inhabitants, especially the Quakers. Patrick Gordon's view of the Ulster Presbyterians as not Scottish wasn't a unique one.

"If those present had lost their language and religion (and were assimilated to the majority Protestant and Anglo-Saxon-derived culture/cultures of the colonies in which they lived)"

This is entirely irrelevant as the colonies were almost entirely Protestant at the time. I mean, are you seriously suggesting that the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Church of England Anglicans in the Southern colonies, and the Ulster Presbyterians in Appalachia constituted some homogenous "Anglo-Saxon" culture? That's the kind of Dillingham Flaw that leads to all manner of erroneous thinking.

The bottom line is, it doesn't matter what you or I think. What matters is what reliable sources say, and reliable sources say that the theory you are pushing here has been discredited by modern scholarship. Your most persuasive argument for separating these pages is your appeal to Wikipedia's notability requirements. Indeed, "Scots-Irish Americans" meet that criteria without any question. However, WP: reliable sources require that we summarize contemporary secondary sources that are relevant and academically sound. Which means we'll be separating these ancestry groups only to explain on one page (or both) why scholars reject this separation. If that's what you want to do, there is nothing I can really say at this point. I don't have consensus on my side and I'm not going to pursue one.Jonathan f1 (talk) 22:36, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: You wrote: "are you seriously suggesting that the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Church of England Anglicans in the Southern colonies, and the Ulster Presbyterians in Appalachia constituted some homogenous "Anglo-Saxon" culture?"

I am not suggesting that and never said nor implied that. There were several varying/differing cultures of (ultimately) Anglo-Saxon derivation in the colonies, not only one.

You wrote: "...and reliable sources say that the theory you are pushing here has been discredited by modern scholarship."

I'm not sure which theory you mean. The theory that the Ulster Protestants were mostly of a separate origin (Scottish/English) and carried a different culture from that of the Native Irish with a different origin (from outside of Ireland) does, not seem to have been be discredited or fundamentally contradicted by the sources.Skllagyook (talk) 22:50, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: In "Scotch-Irish" Myths and "Irish" Identities, Miller writes,

"And, of course, the question of ethnicity or nationality is not one of ancestral birthplace or religion but one of individual and collective identification, which in turn is subjective, situational, and variable, shaped by a multitude of shifting social, cultural, political, and even psychological circumstance. Indeed, one of the presumed benefits of migration from the Old World to the New is that it allowed immigrants to create or choose identities that might differ significantly from the categories imposed by public officials, landlords, clergy, or even kinsmen in their former homelands.

Despite penal laws that mandated sharp legal distinctions, the actual ethnoreligious boundaries between Irish Protestants and Catholics, both in Ireland and in the American colonies, were much more flexible and permeable than they later became, as evidenced, for example, by the presence and intermarriage with Ulster Protestant settlers of a significant minority of "native" or Irish Catholic immigrants in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in eighteenth-century America. Similarly, the earliest Irish-American organizations included merchants and professionals of all denominations, reflecting a tolerance that stemmed from shared business and political interests as well as the influence of Enlightenment rationalism."

In How the Irish Became Protestant in America,^[3] Michael P. Carroll writes,

"Over the past few decades, several lines of evidence have converged to suggest that prior to the Famine Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants were not nearly as different in terms of their cultural beliefs and behaviors as they would later become in the popular imagination."

He goes on to say,

"Investigators working with American materials have also undermined the sharp distinction previously drawn between the Scotch-Irish and Catholic Irish by pointing out that the term Scotch-Irish is itself a product of the nineteenth century."

And:

"Not only did outsiders blend all the Irish into a single category; so did the Irish themselves."

Basically, you argue for page separation based on "cultural", "ethnic", and "ancestral" distinctions between 18th Century Scots-Irish and Irish Catholics which scholars now refute.Jonathan f1 (talk) 23:33, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Jonathan f1: "Okay, so Miller uses ... over as indentured servants." I'm not saying it does support Dolan's assertion. I'm just saying Miller's page 4 quote isn't specific about Irish immigration to the United States and so it can't be used in the article because it isn't directly about the United States as per the WP:Reliable sources policy. However, I've now re-read Maldwyn Jones' entry about the "Scotch-Irish" in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups and she states the following on page 898 that shows that Dolan's assertion may be inaccurate for at least part of the pre-American Revolutionary War migration: "Precisely what proportion of Scotch-Irish emigrants consisted of indentured servants and redemptioners can only be guessed at, but at least in the 1720s it seems to have been high. ... But by the 1770s the promotion of servants appears to have declined." On page 902, Jones goes further: "The decline of the Scotch-Irish servant trade had begun before the Revolution and accelerated until by 1800 it had ceased entirely."

Jones states on page 899 in subsections titled "New England Settlements" and "Pennsylvania and the Southern Backcountry": "In 1718 several hundred newly arrived Scotch-Irish immigrants were sent from Boston to the frontier. Before long an arc of Scotch-Irish settlements stretched along the frontier from western Massachusetts to the coast of Maine"; "The earliest Scotch-Irish settlements in Pennsylvania were founded in the 1720s near Pennsylvania in the present-day counties of Chester and Lancaster. ... By 1750 the entire length of the Cumberland Valley was dotted with Scotch-Irish settlements, and the population had become overwhelmingly Scotch-Irish. ... By the 1750s a chain of Scotch-Irish frontier settlements dotted the 700-mile length of the Great Wagon Road that ran parallel to the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia."

Miller and his co-authors state on pages 128 ~~and 435~~ of Irish Immigrants: "Between 1718 and 1720 about forty vessels from northern Ireland disembarked at Boston perhaps 2,600 Scots-Irish migrants, most of them farmers with families and some capital. ... A substantial minority of the 1718 arrivals went to Maine and spent a miserable winter at Casco Bay before moving south in spring and establishing what be New England's most successful Scots-Irish settlement at Nutfield, later Londonderry, New Hampshire." On pages 143 and 146, Miller et. al also state: "Responding to the lures of cheap land, religious toleration, and civil equality, 'shoals' of Scots-Irish and other emigrants from northern Ireland were soon landing on the Delaware and migrating beyond the crowded precincts of Philadelphia, westward into Chester County and northward, along the east bank of the Susquehanna River, into what would later become Lancaster (est. 1729) and Duphin (est. 1785) counties. … By 1730 at least a hundred Ulster-born families had moved north of Derry and settled in Paxton township… "; "After 1734…families from Ulster began to pour into the Cumberland Valley…in December 1741 alone some 60 families…came to the settlement directly from Antrim, Londonderry, and Fermanagh. By midcentury the entire Cumberland Valley had over five thousand inhabitants, all but a handful of Ulster origin." Miller and his co-authors go on to delineate the settlement of the Shenandoah Valley on pages 147 through 156 again also by family groups.

Jones says on page 896 for migration to the United States that, "By 1775 about 250,000 Ulster Scots had reached the American colonies", a figure which seems to be the most common one, but 50,000 more than Miller and his co-authors state on pages 4 and 7. Jones notes on page 903 that "...a total of perhaps 100,000 people left Ulster for the United States between 1783 and 1812. Many of them joined the Scotch-Irish settlements on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas." Here, Jones' figure is only 50,000 less than the one Miller and co-authors cite for Ulster to North America in between the Revolutionary War and the end of the Napoleonic Wars on page 7. But I must ask: how were so many settlements able to form if the migration to the United States at least was not composed by families as Dolan suggests in The American Catholic Experience on page 129 and as Miller and his co-authors note was quite frequent in the same regions that Jones identifies has having numerous Scotch-Irish settlements?

Additionally, Purvis notes in Colonial America to 1763 on page 162 that the New England Colonies population was sex-balanced by the 1660s and on page 148 that the Middle Colonies population was as well by the 18th century, and both Jones and Miller and his co-authors note that the local populations in Boston and Pennsylvania were not always welcoming of them, so I don't know how frequently they would have been intermarrying with these groups if the migration to the United States was mostly male. This is why I'm reluctant to remove Dolan's page 129 reference, but because the Harvard Encyclopedia was compiled in 1980, is not precise about the indentured servant numbers, and The American Catholic Experience was published in 1985, I will review what Dolan wrote in his 2008 book to see if he states what the sex ratio of the 18th century migration specifically to the United States was.

Jones, Madlwyn A. (1980). "Scotch-Irish". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 896. ISBN 978-0674375123.
Jones, Madlwyn A. (1980). "Scotch-Irish". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 898. ISBN 978-0674375123.
Jones, Madlwyn A. (1980). "Scotch-Irish". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 899. ISBN 978-0674375123.
Jones, Madlwyn A. (1980). "Scotch-Irish". In Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 902. ISBN 978-0674375123.
Purvis, Thomas L. (1999). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Colonial America to 1763. New York: Facts on File. pp. 148. ISBN 978-0816025275.
Purvis, Thomas L. (1999). Balkin, Richard (ed.). Colonial America to 1763. New York: Facts on File. pp. 162. ISBN 978-0816025275. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 01:49, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: It appears that I mixed up two different waves out of Ireland. This source here^[4] is not reliable as a publication, but the author of the piece (a lecturer and researcher of Ulster migrants who is frequently cited in scholarly publications) does qualify as an RS. He says:

"The most important difference between emigrants from Ulster ports and those from ports elsewhere in Ireland, was the greater extent to which the former travelled as paying passengers rather than indentured servants and left as family groups rather than as individuals who were predominantly male."

I can't remember what other source I was recalling (it wasn't this one, but I've read so many that I can't determine which), but it seems to be the majority view that the dominant pattern of emigration out of Ulster was family groups as you maintain, while colonial emigration from southern Irish ports was disproportionately male and consisted of a high number of indentured servants. Since we can infer that a significant portion of emigrants who took ship from southern ports were likely Catholic, this also bolsters Miller's argument about intermarriage among Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Catholics in the Shenandoah Valley during the 18th Century (if they were mostly male indentured servants, they would've had to have either returned to Ireland or married outside the Irish Catholic fold).

I'm okay with Dolan as a reference for this material.Jonathan f1 (talk) 03:30, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

References

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