Via Marginal Revolution, here's a map displaying where Americans live, and all those hyphenated Americans: German Americans, African Americans, etc. It's based on 2000 Census data and people's self-reported ancestry. The color coding reflects the ethnicity with the largest number reporting in a county.
Pondering the logic of the respondents is frustrating: I can understand people saying "American" when their ancestors came over 200 years ago, except of course for African Americans who've been here equally as long. But why is so much of the country coded for German-Americans--were the counties so mixed that a 10 percent response was the largest? . The part of the country coded "American"
is basically the Scots-Irish area of the country, the Appalachians and
the South. Whether or not there was a category for Scots-Irish in the
2000 Census I don't know. I wonder what a similar map for earlier censuses would have shown.
The map reminds us of our diversity: counties with French, Japanese, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian pluralities.
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