Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny Essay

Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Orgins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism explores the evidence and reasons of racial prejudices in America and discusses one of the most controversial topics in American history. The book also navigates the subjects of white superiority, and the creation of Anglo-Saxonism. Manifest Destiny was the belief that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean; it has also been used to advocate for or justify other territorial acquisitions.†¦show more content†¦English scholars proudly wrote how these Germanic people introduced the concepts of freedom, natural law, and popular sovereignty to England. Later, scholars classified these Anglo-Saxons as part of the Caucasian race and linguistically linked them to the family of Indo-European languages. In chapter two â€Å"A ryans Follow the Sun,† Horsman explains another myth of greatness, Anglo-Saxons conjured another falsehood that claimed they were descendants of a great Aryan nation who fled across the mountains of Asia and settled in northern Europe (Horsman 25-41). Just as their descendant’s centuries later, the Aryan nation, in its westward trek, also spread its civilization across Europe, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English laid claim to a superb racial heritage. Chapters three and four deal with British colonists in America that also succumbed to the great myths. Scientists, scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic exacerbated these myths of racial greatness. The English proponents of a chosen race revered their institutions as proof of a nation’s greatness and showed how transmitted concepts of liberty, natural rights and popular sovereignty from the woods of Germany served to perpetuate those bastions of liberty. In the process, in both in Britain and America, a transformation occurredShow MoreRelatedEssay on A Noncolor Blind Society1458 Words   |  6 Pagessuperior race, and that only meant certain groups of people. This American paradox connected directly to racism which included prejudice, discrimination, and institutional inequality defined by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. America is an unequal society destroyed by individual racial discrimination that led to institutional racial discrimination which led to systemic racial discrimination. It all starts with individual racism — one persons opinions or beliefs on someone elses race which