Race And Manifest Destiny Analysis

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In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman takes a look at the origins and progression of Anglo-Saxon racial ideology and examines its consequential impact in American history. The book sets the developments of ideologies of post American Revolution and expansion of newly founded America. Anglo-Saxon supremacy allowed for the suppression of other peoples in American history—it justified their enslavement, domination, exclusion, and extinction.
A man by the name John L. O’Sullivan, spoke of the term manifest destiny to describe American expansion in the early 1840’s. O’Sullivan described how the nation’s expansion was something that could not be stopped and criticized those that went against it process. Horsman writes that even though O’Sullivan
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The Aryan nation, spread its influence and civilization throughout much of Europe, and around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English acknowledged there racial superiority, and in the American colonies centuries later they would follow those same footsteps. Colonies established in American by Britain also sided with the great tales. People of higher influence/social class had much effect on this as well from historians, scientists, scholars, philosophers, writers, and poets on both sides of the western and eastern hemisphere supported these tales of racial greatness. English who believed they were a superior set of people let their institutions lay as proof of ones’ nation’s greatness and showed how the ideas of liberty, natural rights and popular sovereignty transferred over to the colonies. A change began to occur in both Britain and America, where the English went from having much admiration for their political institutions as Anglo-Saxonism and became racialized, which consequentially led to the submission and oppression of Native Americans, Africans, and Mexicans. In …show more content…
In addition, scientific writings concentrated on the physical differences among the races, American movement through the form of literature and arts focused on the special achievements of people, nations, and even the language a set of people spoke. The U.S. became an Anglo-Saxon republic that excluded anyone but whites and used that reasoning to justify the takeover of ethnic groups in areas they wanted control over for resources and expansion and to benefit economically from those areas inhabited with these inferior peoples who were incapable of structural and democratic governments.
In addition with constant exposer with Native Americans and Africans, confrontation between Mexicans and Whites in the Mexican war, Texas Revolution, and the Southwest resulted in Americans clearly appointing themselves as an Anglo-Saxon Race. They clearly labeled Mexicans not only as an inferior people that could not make any use of the land they had, but also stood as a barrier for the expansion of the “superior” white man

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