Race And Manifest Destiny Chapter 1 Analysis

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George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and, of course, Benjamin Franklin talked and noted of their plan to broadcast republicanism. By the 1850s American leaders was less concerned with the liberation of other peoples by the spreading of republicanism. These new leader were also less concerned with the limitless expansion of an allegedly superior American race over supposedly inferior ones. Historian Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny probes the origins of pre-Civil War American racialism and its impact on the course of American expansion.
Chapter three of Race and Manifest Destiny discusses Science and inequality. In chapter three Horsman talks about "the course of a new science –phrenology- is revealing of the manner in which science and popular opinion intertwined to confirm the rapidly growing beliefs in wide divergences between peoples of this world"(Horsman 1981, 56). Horsman was saying science was starting to become people opinion mix with a little bit of science. American revolutionaries struggled to separate themselves from the government of Great Britain. American revolutionaries believed that they were contending for principles of liberty introduced into England more than a thousand years earlier by Anglo-Saxons from Germany.
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Although Horsman acknowledges the presence of "a confused minority" who did not believe "the bombast, the arrogance, the shallow thought" (Horsman 1981, 269) of the antebellum Anglo-Saxonists, more attention needs to be paid to those who refused to condemn other races to permanent inferiority. Nevertheless, Horsman has made a very important contribution to the understanding of antebellum racial