A European American (also known as a Euro-American) is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the original peoples of Europe.
The Spanish were the first Europeans to establish a continuous presence in what is now the United States. Martín de Argüelles born 1566, San Agustín, La Florida, was the first known person of European descent born in what is now the United States. Twenty-one years later, Virginia Dare, born in 1587 on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina, was the first child born in the Thirteen Colonies to English parents.
In 2009, German Americans (16.5%), Irish Americans (11.9%), English Americans (9.0%) and Italian Americans (6.4%) were the four largest self-reported ancestry groups in the United States forming 43.8% of the total population.
Overall, as the largest group, European Americans have the lowest poverty rate and the second highest educational attainment levels, median household income, and median personal income of any racial demographic in the nation (following Asian-Americans who rank first in those categories.)
Read more about European American: Origins, Culture, Demographics, European Ancestries Table
Famous quotes containing the words european and/or american:
“Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“Do not be discouraged, if in a thousand instances you find your kindness rejected and wronged, your good evil-spoken of, and the hand you extend for the relief of others, cast insultingly away; the benevolence which cannot outlive these trials of its purity and strength, is not like the self-sacrifice of him, who went about doing good.”
—C., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 331-4 (July 1828)