Isn't Lewiston where Bates College is? I think it was a papermill town (I decided I couldn't go to Bates, because of the smell). Is the mill closed?

I think it used to be used relatively openly to mark social class and exclusion, and vestiges of that remained into my childhood, where I told and heard French jokes of the sort that are called Polack jokes elsewhere in New England.

I never heard Polish jokes, growing up. They were always Italian jokes. Where, in New England, did you hear "Polack" jokes, Nutty?

Numbers - not cultural influence

Fear the power of the mighty Scots-German hybrid that came out of the forests of the Northeast, united by their dislike of the English colonists.

What's amusing is how some of my older relatives were adamant that they were in no way descended from Scots or Irish and accused me of faking the genealogical records I found.

Not in Lewiston. It's not pretty.

Good college there (Bates), but that's about it, especially once the mills went belly up.

I was amused by how wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong all the stuff in Maine looked in The Sopranos episode where Tony brought Meadow up to visit the big three colleges in Maine (Bates, Colby and Bowdoin, which is in my home town), esepcially since they film in Jersey and not out in California like most shows/movies that get Maine wrong.

There's a plurality of German Americans and their descendants among white Americans?

Most of those boats coming over in the big immigration waves of the early 20th century were full of Germans. The Irish just made more of a splash.

Most of those boats coming over in the big immigration waves of the early 20th century were full of Germans

Fascinating. I'd love to see numbers for how many people immigrated in the last century, and where they came from.

Quebec and its discontents is still a mystery to me. From where I'm standing, it looks like nothing so much as another case of crass, petty, nigh-racist nationalism. "Pur laine" bloodlines and all that--it's nazisoid.

It's sad that so often one apparently cannot defend tradition without falling into crazy discrimination and xenophobia.

Don't get me wrong--all the French Canadians I've met so far have been lovely people, but maybe that's a self-selected sample, those who moved to Ontario. :)

Lewiston hasn't been a paper town for a long while, although there used to be quite a few on the Androscoggin River. (Starting at Berlin, NH, which still smells like farts.)

Bates College is in Lewiston, and it's a very weird place for it, too.

Polack jokes are fairly common in Central Connecticut, where there are a lot of Polish last names. I don't remember what ethnicity was subbed in around Boston. (My guess would have been Portuguese, the Irish having a long history of professional ethnic pride.)

Yes, you too can have a region almost entirely populated by white people, and think of some way to find and magnify differences among them!!

There's a plurality of German Americans and their descendants among white Americans?

Yes. And it's fairly high too, though German-American were much more likely to mix with other ethnicities early on.

With or without removing Hispanics?

I think so, still. Hispanics are often divvied up into two categories with the EEO for Hispanic, White and Hispanic, Not So White. I'm not sure of their total numbers, but I still think German-Americans have the biggest single ethnic chunk.

I'd love to see numbers for how many people immigrated in the last century, and where they came from.

[link]

"Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850-1990"

Ask a genealogist and ye shall receive

From here [link] you can get a PDF report that says, among other things, that nearly 1 in 6 people reported German ancestry on the 2000 US Census.

In 2000, 42.8 million people (15 percent of the population) considered themselves to be of German (or part-German) ancestry, the most frequent response to the census question (Figure 2).4 Other ancestries with over 15 million people in 2000 included Irish (30.5 million, or 11 percent), African American (24.9 million, or 9 percent), English (24.5 million, or 9 percent), American (20.2 million, or 7 percent), Mexican (18.4 million, or 7 percent), and Italian (15.6 million, or 6 percent).