Reginald E. Horsman
Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Horsman puts to rest the conventional notion that a national
character was born out of the Civil War. For the birth of
racialism, he credits an 18th century European shift from
"a continuity of institutions to the continuity of innate racial
strengths," and shows that the supposed superiority of
Anglo-Saxonism was visited not only upon Native Americans and
imported African slaves, but also on the "new" immigrants of
the late 1800s as well.
