What is a WASP?

[jimrtex]

Good post Torie. One point of clarification I would add is that the plantations of Ireland started much earlier.  There were plantations in the Irish Midlands under the Catholic Mary and Elizabethan plantations.  These were largely English settlements. A seminal moment in Irish history was The Flight of the Earls in 1607, where the Gaelic chieftains decamped to Europe after their defeat in the revolution of 1601.  This left a power vacuum where the land was scooped up. The private plantations in Antrim and Down were much more successful than the other crown plantations in the rest of Ulster (borne out in demographic maps to this day).  This served dual purpose because in got rid of restive Scots on the northern border and destroyed the Irish power base in the usually rebellious North. The massacre of those settlers in the civil war years of the 1640's still holds power in the Protestant community and there are banners commemorating this at every Orange parade still.  The Cromwell conquest solidified the new Protestant landownership in the provinces of Munster and Connaught.   (Leinster has been English or Anglo Norman dominated since 1270)  King Billy's defeat of Séamus an Chaca' was merely the final death knell.  As I noted above though, the dissenter Protestant community were not much better off than the Catholics and a large reason why so many Ulstermen came to America.  Thanks for giving me a forum to babble

William of Orange was seen as a folk hero in America.  Thomas Paine compared George Washington to William, when trying to rally the Americans at Valley Forge.  William (or Parliament) also undid the attempted consolidation of New England.   The Glorious Revolution was seen as a restoration of democracy after usurpation under the Stuarts, and later betrayed by the Hanovers.  The Bill of Rights added to the US Constitution is quite similar in form to the British version.

[jimrtex]

This forum uses it in a bizarre way I'd never seen before...  I always thought of it as exactly what it stands for:
White (obvious enough)
Anglo Saxon (English/German/Northern European with fair features)
Protestant (mainline denomination, not evangelical).

I've heard that definition a lot, but
1. In which way are Germans and Northern Europeans Anglo Saxons?
2. Isn't Anglo Saxon almost redundant in this case, because how many White Protestants are there historically that are not British, German, Dutch or Northern European? (Huguenots? Hussites? Valdesi? Sobozinians?)

Excuse my ignorance and preliminary knowledge on the subject, but I was under the impression that the Anglos were from England and the Saxons were from Germany, giving rise to the definition I used.  As for your second point, I agree.  I was just saying I'd usually heard it used that way.  Honestly, without trying to veer off subject or getting to tender subjects, I kind of always associated it with ethnicities of people that the Nazis would have gone all googly-eyes over.

The Angles were from what is now Schleswig-Holstein, who settled in eastern Britain, where they gave their name to East Anglia, the part of Britain that sticks out northeast of London.  But the Angles settled as far north as Edinburgh.  The Saxons were in southern England around London, where they gave their name to Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Middlesex.  Over time they became intertwined and their language of English developed. 

Anglo-Saxon generally refers to someone from Britain or particularly England, and also the the English-speaking world, particularly the special relationship between the USA and GB (terms such as British or English, of course would not be acceptable in the USA, to the way that they would in Canada or Australia).

WASP may have originally been Wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the elite, wealthy, largely of English or British descent, Protestants who dominated American business and society, particularly through WWII.  It is a handy term if you are Catholic, or Jewish, or ethnic, or black, and want to claim you are using a descriptive term, but want to use it in a disparaging or derogatory manner.