Descendants of the 2 million Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, emigrants from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, who arrived in the US from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. “Scotch Irish,” a North American term, was increasingly used to distinguish them from the Catholic Irish Americans who emigrated to America after the Great Famines of the late 1840s. One in eight Americans traces ancestry to the Scotch Irish.

While found everywhere in the US, most live today in Pennsylvania, the Virginias and the Carolinas. They have excelled in American education, publishing, commerce, finance, the military, religion and politics. No fewer than ten presidents of the US were of Scotch-Irish descent.