Talk:Scottish Americans

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 August 2020 and 19 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Haley89900.

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External links modified

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Original research

A series of edits on October 30, 2018 made changes to ethnic categories, population counts and percentages in section "Scottish Americans by state‎" not backed up by sources. For example, in these edits, figures were changed to up the count of Irish-Americans from 80k to 200k, and drop that of Scottish-Americans from 280k to 130k with no references. (Why it took 36 edits to change five figures is anybody's guess.) Mathglot (talk) 00:26, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Backed out this series of 54 edits to version 859887426 of 23:15, September 16, 2018 by BilCat. This also undid eleven more recent edits by seven users; those have been reinstated, with a couple of exceptions (see edit summary). Mathglot (talk) 06:56, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Again with the 25 million figure..

Only about 5 million Americans report Scottish ancestry, and only about 4-5 million report Scotch-Irish ancestry. Jim Webb's "Born Fighting" is not a reliable source and isn't appropriate for this article. We're having the same problem on the Irish American page, where Scotch-Irish partisan editors are using dubious sources to make similar changes.Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:26, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Scratch that -- the latest census figures I could find state the Scottish American population to be about 5.3 million and the Scotch-Irish Americans are roughly 2.9 million. And I used the same reference in this article (US Census, but for the year 2013).Jonathan f1 (talk) 22:22, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

emigration mythology

The article states (in the lead) that: Large-scale emigration from Scotland to America began in the 1700s, accelerating after the Jacobite rising of 1745, the resulting breakup of the clan structures, and the Highland Clearances.

This seems to perpetuate the myth that those descended from migrants from Scotland are predominantly of Highland descent. The vast majority of emigrating Scots were Lowlanders. Yes, there were Highland emigrants, but the romantic vision tends to overcome historical accuracy. The actual history, as conveyed by one of Scotland's leading historians is:

Many third- and fourth-generation American Scots share the view that Scottish emigration across the Atlantic came from the Highlands and was initiated by force and coercion. The boring reality is that the vast majority left from the farms, towns and cities of the Lowlands and were mainly attracted to North America because they saw it as a fabled land of opportunity to achieve a better life. The mythology, however, has it that the ancestors were driven from their homeland by the collapse of the Jacobite Risings, post-Culloden ethnic cleansing and, above all, by ‘the clearances’.

— T M Devine, The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900 (2019) p.11

Furthermore, many more Scots emigrated in the years after the clearances, and certainly long after the Jacobite rebellion. There was an accelerating flow of emigrants from the middle of the 19th century, with a temporary pause for the First World War, which; large-scale Scottish emigration only ceased with the Great Depression. To look at some hard numbers, Marjory Harper in her Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars, in setting the general context of Scottish emigration (pg 2), gives the following background. In the century before the First World War almost 2,000,000 people left Scotland, which in 1911 had a population of 4,760,904. The population of the Highlands has never much exceeded 300,000. Furthermore, if you look at the number of Scottish emigrants as a percentage of the natural increase in population, you get:
27.6% 1855-60
rising to
54.1% 1881-90
and reaching
84.3% 1901-1910
and exceeding the natural population increase in 1907, 1910 and 1911-13.
So most of emigrating Scots left long after the days of the clearances, and the sheer numbers involved meant that only some of them could originate in the Highlands.

I suggest that some corrective rephrasing is needed.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 12:39, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

It may be worth pointing out that the article uses the word "Highland" 35 times, and "Lowland" 9 times. If these numbers were reversed, it would be closer to the respective proportions of migrants from each of these two regions of Scotland (though still over-representing the Highlands). It is disturbing to see a Wikipedia article which is a good example of the treatment of this subject that is ridiculed by the academic historians who study it. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 00:11, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

ThoughtIdRetired's contribution

I was invited to appear on talk by @ThoughtIdRetired in reference to a revert he made. My concern with your edit is that you are placing a rhetorical flourish that Devine uses to create interest for his work in the introduction at the expense of scholarship--scholarship elsewhere in the book. I appreciate the 'slap down' is attractive thing to do if you are disposed a certain way (re your comment 'Devine's ridicule of the beliefs of Scottish American's heritage may not be palatable to fans of this article'), but the introduction should be neutral and fact-based and reflect good scholarship not desire to attack a perceived opponent. The text I altered is I think misleading. He doesn't say the conception is common, even if he is implying that he is discussing popular media depictions, ones that are actually about Highlanders anyway and not attempting to do what Devine does, i.e. cover Scotland as a whole (or as professional reviewers have complained, Scotland from a Central Belt perspective). Also, the scholarship elsewhere in the book, in the pages I referenced, Devine emphasises that land clearance and poverty were factors in migration from the Lowlands too. The text here as it stands implies something that Devine doesn't say, that purely positive opportunities were the main reason (he only says 'better life' even at p. 11). EDIT I have tried to tweak the wording somewhat again so that you are less likely to think the article is downplaying dismissing Devine's intended purposes. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 21:33, 31 July 2024 (UTC)