Did you hear about the midget accused of rape? He said his friends put him up to it.Hoosier Daddy wrote:Sheep that walk on their knees. An Ironton midget's dream.
b'dm, chhhhhh!
Moderators: The People's DJ, David Paleg
Yep and it's a pretty good one. Surprisingly fair and moderate on the political stuff too (for public TV).Arp2 wrote:Wasn't that the focus of one of those three documentaries your "public" TV did?Lee wrote:I guess Scotland and West Virginia have alot in common after all...
Scotch-Irish. That's my predominant ancestry, but there are six or seven others tossed in their too.Arp2 wrote:It said a large amount of the population of WV is of Scotish and/or something-or-other-mixed-descent, so I thought that was already a given.
Scots-Irish Americans
The Scots-Irish arrived in America in the early eighteenth century in large numbers. Roughly a quarter of a million arrived between 1717 and 1776. From the first, they were treated in the American colonies by the British colonial government as they had been in Ulster, so they quickly left for the hill country where they could avoid their influence. Here they lived on the frontiers of America, carving their own world out of the wilderness.[verification needed] Early frontier life was extremely challenging, but poverty and hardship were familiar to them. The word "hillbilly" has often been used of them, disparagingly, this word having its origins in Ireland itself, always in reference to the Ulster Scots.
According to James Leyburn's The Scotch Irish: A Social History (1962), the Scots-Irish usually referred to themselves simply as Irish, without the qualifier "Scotch" or "Scots", and were called Irish by others. It was not until the mass immigration of Irish in the 1840s due to the Irish Potato Famine (most of whom were Catholic, indigenous, Irish) that the earlier Irish Americans began to call themselves Scotch-Irish to distinguish themselves from these new arrivals. This newer wave of Irish typically settled in the coastal urban centers. Thus, the Catholic Irish of Boston, New York City, etc., who descended from the 1840s wave, did not often mingle in early years with the Scotch-Irish, who by contrast had become well-established in the American interior, especially the hill country of the Appalachians and Ozarks.
The Scotch-Irish soon became the dominant culture of the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia, not only because of their numbers, but because of their independent spirits, adventurous personalities, and restless natures. They became the frontiersmen of the prairie and cowboys of the West. Author (and U.S. Senator) Jim Webb puts forth a thesis in his book Born Fighting to suggest that the character traits of the Scots-Irish, such as loyalty to kin, mistrust of governmental authority, and military readiness, helped shape the American identity.
In the 1790s, the new American government assumed the debts the individual states had amassed during the American Revolutionary War, and the Congress placed a tax on whiskey (among other things) to help repay those debts. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. However, smaller producers, many of whom were Scottish descent and located in the more remote areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These rural settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market other than fermenting and distilling it into relatively portable distilled spirits. From Pennsylvania to Georgia, the western counties engaged in a campaign of harassment of the federal tax collectors. "Whiskey Boys" also made violent protests in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. [1] This civil disobedience eventually culminated in armed conflict in the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington marched at the head of 13,000 soldiers to put down the rebellion.