RACE CONSCIOUSNESS IN US

How much of a Role Have the Issues of Race and Class played In U.S. History In 1776 until 1865?



How much of a Role Have the Issues of Race and Class played In U.S. History In 1776 until 1865?

Introduction

Races and classes have played an important role in the history of United States. American nativism can be understood in reference to American national ethic group whose myth has evolved prior to huge immigration of the nineteenth century. It is very difficult to understand the social construction of US without understanding this issue. Therefore, this paper emphasizes on prior 1865 era. The paper will discuss the evolution of Anglo American ethnicity from 1776 to 1865.

The origins of American rejection of other peoples have to be sought both in the United States and in Europe. In one respect the new assumptions stemmed logically from the whole trend towards racialist thinking in Western thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. The concept of superior and inferior races that saturated American minds about continental and world mission also often permeated the thinking of the English and of western Europeans in general by the mid nineteenth century.

In the first half of nineteen century, a number of Americans were restless to justify the enslavement of blacks and the extermination and possible expulsion of the Indians. The intellectual community in American did not simply absorb European ideas yet American racial thoughts were similar to that of English. As English colonials, the new Americans fell heir to a long Anglo Saxon Teutonic tradition and long before the concept of Anglo Saxon emerged the Americans shared with the English a belief in the political and individual freedom of the Anglo Saxon era.

National Ethnicity

Ethnic groups can be referred to as a group of people that share a common belief in a lineage and homeland with the threshold requirement of territory and population that differentiate them from clans or tribes. On the other hand, nations are described as communities of various cultures in which its associates shares a common politico territorial identity with a shared official culture, shared a common history and bound by common legal obligations.

Almost every nation is formed from ethic foundation. It usually starts from myth symbol complexes that then change it shape with passing age and furnish the material for the development of the modern nation's symbol including its civil religion. When we talk about national ethnic group of United States, it refers to Anglo American Protestants. This was a European group who believed the United States territory as their homeland.

Colonial Antecedents

The basis of Anglo American ethnicity is trace to the settlement that typify the united states in the colonization era. It is said that United States commenced as a collection of carious cultural regions which is based around the settler groups of England. Therefore, it is not astonishing that at the eve of revolution, the American free population was 60% English, 80% British and around 98% ...