Race and Manifest Destiny by Reginald Horsman

Race and Manifest Destiny by Reginald Horsman

American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Reginald 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.

A work of monumental scope[Horsman] has permanently changed the accepted scholarly understanding of racial Anglo-Saxonism. * Reviews in American History *
The most lucidly written, comprehensive portrayal of antebellum racial thought to date. * The Yale 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 *
A well-documented, in-depth study of antebellum racial thought which challenges the older view of historians that racial Anglo-Saxonism was not intellectually ascendant in American thought before the Civil War… A very important contribution. * Indiana Magazine of History *

Reginald Horsman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of eleven other books, including Frontier Doctor: William Beaumont, America's First Great Medical Scientist (University of Missouri Press) and, most recently, The New Republic: The United States of America, 1789-1815.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780674948051
ISBN 10	067494805X
Title	Race and Manifest Destiny
Author	Reginald Horsman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Year published	1986-10-15
Number of pages	380
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable