This is a cultural geographic view on Scots-Irish immigration from Ulster to the Bible Belt. Drawing insights from geography, history, social psychology, sociology, and theology, Vann investigates the ways in which Scottish Calvinism affected the sense of identity and the migrations of native Scots first to Ulster and then to the American South. Vann presents a geographical perspective on the migrations of Scots to Ulster, showing that most population flows involving southwest Scotland during the first half of seventeenth century were directed across the Irish Sea via centuries-old sea routes that had allowed for the formation of evolving cultural areas. As political or religious motivational factors presented themselves in the last half of that century, Vann holds, the established social and familial links stretched along those sea routes facilitated chain migration that led to the birth of a Protestant Ulster-Scots community - a community constituted along religious and institutional rubrics of dissent from the monarch’s churches. Within a century of the birth of this
Ulster-Scots Land,
five immigration waves to America served as conduits for diffusing significant elements of that culture to the upper American South where the Scots-Irish presence helped to form the cultural area referred to as the Bible Belt. Vann maps this significant portion of the South’s ethnic mosaic to show the genesis of the educational, political, and religious institutions that stem from Ulster Scots’ presence. With such deeply ingrained values, the southern Scots Irish have influenced the region’s staunchly conservative belief systems and political ideology.