The invisibility of English-Americans
One interesting aspect of American social history is the complete lack of a self-conscious English-American ethnic community.
Even in the 20th Century, the number of immigrants in America who had been born in England was comparable to the number born in the predominantly Catholic southern 26 counties of Ireland (Eire), a famous source of ethnic immigrants.
But these newcomers from England apparently turned into unhyphenated Regular Americans almost immediately. A characteristic example was comedian Bob Hope, who immigrated from England in 1908 at age 4 and thereafter struck everybody as extremely American-American.
In contrast, the American-born Bing Crosby was famously Irish-American, but in truth he was Irish only on his mother’s side and she was born in America. Bing was English and Scottish on his father’s side. The first Crosby in America was a Puritan who arrived in New England in the 1630s.
I suppose there were a few English-American enclaves. When I lived in Santa Monica in 1982, it had a modest reputation as a favorite place for Englishmen in the movie industry to live due to the mild climate. But, other than a few pubs, it was hard to tell. In any case, the Santa Monica English tended to be more ex-pats out of The Loved One rather than immigrants out of The Departed.
Due to the American Revolution, Americans could be either Anglophile (e.g., Alexander Hamilton) or Anglophobe (Thomas Jefferson). Reading the life stories of 19th and early 20th Century WASP Americans, it is hard to predict whether they would have a inherited a pro- or anti-English family tradition.
It is something of an issue that there isn’t a strong, explicitly English identity in Americans of such extract. As the English have arguably been the most successful ethnic group in history, equal to or beside the Jewish people. I hope a certain level of ethnogenesis (or realization) spreads among the English diaspora.
The overwhelmingly English character of middle America's white population is pretty clear if you look at just about any directory in your typical town or small city.
America is also much more Welsh than people realize: two Welsh surnames, Williams and Jones, make the top five US surnames.
I think the problem with the English ethnic thing is partly that it didn't really catch on in England itself until early modern times. England means "land of the Angles," but the Germans who settled mostly identified as Saxons, right? So it's kind of a misnomer.
The language we speak is a hybrid of Saxon, Norman French and a little Norse. The population is ethnically, for the most part, native British. Early Americans were well aware of all this: Benjamin Franklin even suggested we be careful about German immigration because our (British) forefathers made that mistake before.
I think it's pretty clear that colonial Americans weren't all that attached to English as an identity. We readily gave it up, and even the loyalists were more attached to the crown than they were to Mother England or any such 20th century type of nationalism.
I personally feel a kinship with English people, who are culturally not all that different from me, but despite having plenty of "English" ancestors, the English identity in the nationalist sense seems pretty foreign. In a sense, English and American ethnicity are not compatible precisely because we come from the same root stock. There must be some division to make our American identity meaningful.