It’s curious the Freemasons had any connection to Jacobitism, or to Restorationism, at all. Back then, the Masons were known as secularizing republican freethinkers – diametrically opposed to Catholic traditionalist-legitimists.
If we’re going by cattle rustling then the United States is basically an Assyrian nation.
(damn few, and they’re a’ deid!)
Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but isn’t there the argument that the Declaration of Abroath was a great influence on the US Declaration of Independance?
I thought that was the one thing that people would know about Dukakis!
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama
But seriously, whether the Irish identify someone as being Irish has a lot more to do with whether they like him than it does with actual ancestry. There were folks in Ireland rooting for Obama to win specifically because he was Irish… Never mind that his opponent was named McCain.
Almost every person I know was rooting for Obama. Not because he was of Irish heritage but because he was Obama. I will have to admit however that almost everyone I know would be classed as pinko commie bastards in the States 
Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys have a good rendition of the song as well.
Well, of course that was the underlying reason, but I saw several folks who (at least facetiously) said that their support was because of his heritage.
Is it really that German is the largest ancestral group in the US, or rather that more Americans claim German ancestry than any other ancestry? Americans can often claim more than one ethnic origin, but will often go with the one that sounds more “interesting” (German rather than English, for example).
Quick straw poll: How many americans do you know who hyphenate themselves as English-Americans?
I expect that americans of english ancestry are vastly undercounted for a similar reason. My guess is that England contributed more immigrants than any other country until fairly recently.
I wonder what you could learn about the ancestry of early settlers from a study of place names? Count up the New Yorks and the Albanys and the Plymouths and the Portsmouths and compare that to the New Glasgows and the Aberdeens and the Edinburghs and the Arbroaths.
I wonder what you’d find.
Who were themselves Norsemen, only recently moved to Scotland.
So we are basically Vikings, if you want to split hairs.
Vikings claimed they were descendants of Ask (an Ash tree) and Embla (an Elm tree) transformed into humans by Odin, so that means Americans have always been green.
It should be noted that the so-called “Scotch Irish” who colonized Ulster were actually a mix of immigrants from Scotland and from northern England. So even the “Scotch Irish” are about as much English as they are Scottish.
And anyway, I think the “Scotch Irish” influence in America is often romanticized and overstated. It’s there, of course, but it wasn’t enough to overwhelm the earlier English colonizations. The Virginia colony grew exponentially in the years following the establishment of Jamestown, and it did so with overwhelmingly English settlers. The Ulster Scots who arrived later in no way subsumed that established culture, though they certainly contributed to it.
(And as Tom notes, German immigration is the often-overlooked X-factor in American culture. Germans came in large numbers to both the northern and southern colonies.)
I think that is overstating the Viking influence. They were quite late in the various invasions, although to be fair there are parts of Scotland that do retain a certain Norse aspect to this day, mostly the very far north of the mainland and the Northern Isles. Of course, bits of these parts are closer to Norway than they are to,say, Edinburgh, and until fairly recently trade was much easier in that direction.
I’ve lived here all of my 42 years, and I have never thought of the USA as being Scottish in any way. WASPs are Protestant, but seldom Scottish.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of good points above, just that it’s never occurred to me before this.
The generally cited statistic is that there are more German American than English Americans:
I have no idea if someone has done a really good, scientific study of what the largest amount of ancestry is.
And I don’t think you can even rely on self reporting. Here in the South, a lot of people think they have Dutch ancestry, when in fact what they have is “Deutsch” (German) ancestry. I heard for years about the “Dutch” part of my family, and it turned out that the “Dutch” branch was actually German, part of the Moravian community in North Carolina. (Everybody down this way who has heard about a “Dutch” ancestor, or a “black Dutch” ancestor, you may actually have a German ancestor.)
I apparently do a lot of things No True Scotsman would ever do.
I would like to wear kilts more often, though.