The eighteenth-century emigration of perhaps as many as 250,000 Ulster Protestants to the British American colonies was one of the largest transatlantic European migrations of the early modern period. Traditionally historians have structured their examinations of the Scots-Irish within a narrative framework beginning in the northern Irish province of Ulster or the western shores of Scotland and ending on the frontiers of North America. In so doing, they have paid little attention to how large scale emigration affected the culture and life strategies of the Irish communities that fed the exodus. My research focuses on how American news and events impacted upon Irish Presbyterians during the period of the Seven Years’ War. Primarily, I am interested in how migration provided the foundation for an Atlantic identity among Irish Presbyterians built upon a sense of shared religion and imagined cultural similarity with their kinfolk on the other side of the ocean. Other questions addressed in my dissertation include: How pervasive was the lure of migration in the eighteenth-century Irish imagination? Did the harrowing stories of frontier violence, often involving Irish settlers, printed in local and national newspapers affect the sensibilities of these communities? In order to answer these questions I have consulted an array of sources in Britain, Ireland, and America, including personal diaries, newspapers, printed and manuscript sermons, private correspondence, and Presbyterian Church records.