Tammie Alton, age 11, of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, for her question:
WHY ARE PEOPLE IN THE U.S.A. CALLED YANKEES?
The song "Yankee Doodle'' has been popular in America since colonial days. The tune is an old one that goes back to the Middle Ages in southern Europe. The verses started with these meaningless words: Yanker dudel doodle down. The song was popular in Holland about 1500 and English children sang it in England during William Shakespeare's time.
When Oliver Cromwell rode down from Canterbury to take charge of the Puritan forces, an English form of the song "Yankee Doodle" poked fun at him. The words went:
Yankee Doodle came to town/ Upon a Kentish pony,/ He stuck a feather in his cap/ And called it macaroni. In those days, the word ''macaroni'' referred to the young men of London who dressed in odd Italian styles.
The song known in the United States had words written by an English army surgeon, Dr. Richard Schuckburgh. The song made fun of the untrained American troops during the French and Indian War in 1755.
But the American troops liked "Yankee Doodle" and the song became popular through all of the American colonies by the time of the Revolutionary War.
People in other countries call a person from the United States a Yankee. In the southern United States, the word Yankee means a Northerner, or someone who comes from north of Mason and Dixon's line. And to most people in America, the word Yankee means a New Englander.
No one is sure where the word Yankee came from. Some say it comes from the Scottish word yankie which meant a sharp and clever woman. Others suggest it is an Indian pronunciation of the word ''English'' or of the French word for English, which is Anglais.
The word may have come from the Dutch. People from the Netherlands were called Jan Kees, which was short for the common Dutch names of Jan and Cornelis. Some say that the people of Flanders gave the same name to Netherlanders who lived in North America.
The first person to use the word Yankee very widely was a farmer in Cambridge, Mass., named Jonathan Hastings. He used the word in the early 1700s to express the idea of excellence, speaking of a Yankee good horse, or Yankee cider.
When British soldiers made fun of New England troops during the Revolutionary War by calling them Yankees, the Americans liked the name. Later, during the Civil War, Confederate soldiers called Federal troops ''Yankees.''
And much later than that, all of the United States troops arriving in Paris in 1917 were hailed by the French press as either Yankees or Yanks. Since World War I, almost all Europeans have continued to call American soldiers Yankees.