Synopses & Reviews
American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Mr. Horsman's book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation's ideology by 1850.
The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the "new" immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists.
In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be "regenerated" through the spread of free institutions.
Review
The book offers an insightful perspective stressing the unity of racist thought...Well written and organized, Race and Manifest Destiny confronts an important subject in western history, yet never loses sight of the broader themes of the American past. Western Historical Quarterly
Review
A work of monumental scope. [Horsman] has permanently changed the accepted scholarly understanding of racial Anglo-Saxonism. Reviews in American History
Review
The most lucidly written, comprehensive portrayal of antebellum racial thought to date. The Yale Review
Review
A well-documented, in-depth study of antebellum racial thought which challenges the older view of historians that racial Anglo-Saxonism was not intellectually ascendent in American thought before the Civil War...A very important contribution. Indiana Magazine of History
Synopsis
American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Mr. Horsman's book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation's ideology by 1850
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. European and Colonial Origins
1. Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons
2. Aryans Follow the Sun
3. Science and Inequality
4. Racial Anglo-Saxonism in England
II. American Destiny
5. Providential Nation
6. The Other Americans
7. Superior and Inferior Races
8. The Dissemination of Scientific Racialism
9. Romantic Racial Nationalism
III. An Anglo-Saxon Political Ideology
10. Racial Destiny and the Indians
11. Anglo-Saxons and Mexicans
12. Race, Expansion, and the Mexican War
13. A Confused Minority
14. Expansion and World Mission
Conclusion
Notes
Index