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Ulster-American Heritage Symposium

Ulster-American Heritage Symposium

[May 17; for immediate release]

Ulster-American Heritage Symposium

Connections between Ulster and the U.S. to be Explored

In late June of this year will occur an exciting, concentrated opportunity to learn about Ulster-American connections when the Sixteenth Biennial Ulster-American Heritage is held in Knoxville, Tennessee, from June 28 to July 1. The event, hosted by the East Tennessee Historical Society, will over the course of four days feature lectures, performances, and events to explore these connections under the theme "Three Centuries of Ulster-American History, Tradition, and Shared Experience." Since 1976, when it was founded at the University of Ulster, the Ulster-American Heritage Symposium has met alternately in Northern Ireland or the United States in order to encourage and promote the scholarly study and public awareness of connections between Ulster and North America in all their dimensions.

Speakers at this year's symposium will include more than three dozen historians, archaeologists, museum officials, anthropologists, genealogists, educators, architectural researchers, historical preservationists, and many other specialists on a program that is geared the general public as well as academics. The majority of papers will deal with the migration and settlement of Scotch-Irish/Scots-Irish people in the U.S., especially in Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, but a wide variety of other topics will also be offered, including the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the ancestry of Edgar Allan Poe, frontier religion, and the temperance movement. Two special sessions are particularly worthy of note. One will focus on the service of Americans in Northern Ireland during World War II. It will feature a lecture by Jonathan Bardon of Queen's University Belfast, period newsreel, and a panel discussion by American veterans and people from Northern Ireland who experienced the American presence in the early 1940s. Another will deal with genealogy and include lectures on conducting research for Ulster ancestors in the United States, Ireland, and Scotland and a special report on a large-scale DNA genealogy project now underway. Those attending the conference will be able to make use of the Calvin McClung Collection, a major genealogical library attached to the East Tennessee Historical Society.

Near the Great Smoky Mountains and many other attractions, Knoxville is an ideal site for spending time in a part of southern Appalachia that today counts a large proportion of its citizens as having Ulster ancestry. For more information on the conference, visit the website of the East Tennessee Historical Society ( www.east-tennessee-history.org ) or contact its organizers (Michael Montgomery at ullans@yahoo.com, Michael Toomey at www.east-tennessee-history.org, or Cherel Henderson at cherel@east-tennessee-history.org ).
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