Editing Ulster (section)

===Emigration===
Considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots (who became commonly known as "Scots-Irish" in America) emigrated to the North American colonies throughout the 18th century (160,000 settled in what would become the United States between 1717 and 1770 alone).

Disdaining (or forced out of) the heavily English regions on the Atlantic coast, most groups of Ulster-Scots settlers crossed into the "western mountains", where their descendants populated the [[Appalachian Mountains|Appalachian]] regions and the [[Ohio Valley]]. Here they lived on the frontiers of America, carving their own world out of the wilderness. The Scots-Irish soon became the dominant culture of the Appalachians from [[Pennsylvania]] to [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]]. Author (and US Senator) [[Jim Webb]] puts forth a thesis in his book ''Born Fighting'' to suggest that the character traits he ascribes to the Scots-Irish such as loyalty to kin, mistrust of governmental authority, and a propensity to bear arms, helped shape the American identity.

In the [[United States Census, 2000]], 4.3&nbsp;million Americans claimed Scots-Irish ancestry. The areas where the most Americans reported themselves in the 2000 Census only as "American" with no further qualification (e.g. [[Kentucky]], north-central [[Texas]], and many other areas in the [[Southern US]]) are largely the areas where many Scots-Irish settled, and are in complementary distribution with the areas which most heavily report Scots-Irish ancestry.

According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, 400,000 people in the US were of Irish birth or ancestry in 1790 when the first US Census counted 3,100,000 white Americans. According to the encyclopaedia, half of these Irish Americans were descended from Ulster, and half from the other three provinces of Ireland.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Miller|first=Randall M.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=o7bkGF4DytgC&q=half+of+these+Irish+Americans+were+descended+from+Ulster&pg=PA333|title=The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in America [4 volumes]|date=2008-12-30|publisher=ABC-CLIO|isbn=978-0-313-06536-1|language=en}}</ref>