Saturday 20 November 2010

Ulsterite

In 1921 the American historian James T Adams (1878-1949) wrote The Founding of New England, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History.  In it he said: 'The Puritanism of any individual today may derive quite as directly from an ancestral Bermudian, Georgian, Jamaican Commonwealth man, Carolinian Scotch Covenanter or Pennsylvanian Ulsterite as from a settler in Salem or Plymouth.'  A century ago the word Ulsterite was in common use for an Ulsterman and this is but one example of many.'

On 22 September 1913 the New York Times carried the headline: 'Carson Getting Bellicose: But Liberals are loath to take action against the Ulsterite'.

Back in 1914 James Connolly wrote Labour in Irish History.  It was reviewed in the Socialist Standard, a journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain,  in June 1914 and the reviewer said that Connolly's work 'cuts through the sham superficialities of the struggle between Home Ruler and Ulsterite, Catholic and Protestant'.

In December 1919 the Chicago Tribune also described Sir Edward Carson as an Ulsterite.

A headline in Time magazine on 16 November 1925 said, 'Book Flung across House of Commons!' 'Wild Ulsterite Attacks Winston Churchill!'  This was a reference to an occasion when Ronald McNeill MP threw a book at Churchill.

Dr H M J Klein wrote A History of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania in 1926 and said: 'It is generally recognized that the first dominant Scotch-Irish settlements in Lancaster county were in its 'Upper End' or northern part, not in the 'Lower End', as the five Scotch-Irish townships of southern Lancaster are sometimes called.  The settlement of the aggressive Ulsterites in Lancaster county seated a power which soon became evident in the local government.

Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker (1879-1966) wrote The Planters of Colonial Virginia, which was published by Oxford University Press and Princeton University Press in 1922.  In it he referred to waves of immigration and said, 'The indentured servant differed in no essential from the poor Ulsterite or German who followed him in the Eighteenth century, or the Irishman, the Italian or the Slav in the Nineteenth.'

Lewis Clark Walkinshaw wrote Annals of Southwestern Pennsylvania [c1939] and in a short biography of Judge Richard Drum Laird he said that 'his first American ancestor was John Laird, an Ulsterite from County Donegal'.

Time magazine used the word again on 14 July 1947, describing the golfer Fred Daly as 'jaunty little Ulsterite Fred Daly of Belfast'.

Today the word is comparatively rare but it is an alternative word for an Ulsterman.

The word is also used in relation to a resident of Ulster County, New York.

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