Today’s Guardian reports on an AHRC-funded project looking at the history of the English in North America and specifically where history ‘lost sight of Englishness’ in America.

Yankees have always loved to talk up their Irish blood – and Scottish, too. But Americans celebrating their Englishness? That's not quite so common. The new project at Northumbria University – called Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective - hopes to investigate this.

The team, led by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson, argue that the existence of English cultural communities in North America has been largely ignored by traditional historians who see the English as assimilating into Anglo-American culture without any need to overtly express a separate English ethnicity.

The three-year project has received £286,000 from the AHRC. It aims to take a fresh look at English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts and newspaper articles from this period. The team believes that their research will have wider reaching implications in shedding light on current debates in UK identity politics and Englishness.

To read the Guardian article, please go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/13/english-nationalism-lack-of-pride?INTCMP=SRCH

For more information please see the project website: http://www.englishdiaspora.co.uk/index2.html