At the end of the nineteenth century, English-speaking North Americans discussed race as later generations might discuss the weather. The same subjects found a ready audience on both sides of the border. In the press, in speeches, and in their letters to one another, Canadians and Americans discussed the common issues of immigration, “Indians,” Jews, blacks, and French Canadians. In hisThe Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt made no effort to conceal his contempt for the “savages,” who were destined to be “displaced” on the continent.¹ The editor ofQueen’s Quarterlywelcomed Americans to the Canadian west because “they...

The Venezuela boundary crisis served as an important and necessary first step in America’s rise to world power status. At the end of 1895, Great Britain backed its colony Guiana in a border dispute with neighbouring Venezuela. Americans responded by claiming British actions violated the 1823 Monroe Doctrine’s prohibition on territorial expansion in the New World by any European nation. During the crisis the United States asserted hegemony over the western hemisphere, placing the nation in potential conflict with Great Britain. After a few week of war-talk, Great Britain quickly backed down, essentially acknowledging edging American dominance on the American...

Like Thomas Bayard in the United States, many English Canadians associated the ideas of continental free trade and Canadian-American racial affinity. In theHandbook of Commercial Unionpublished by the Toronto Commercial Union Club in 1888, a number of writers utilized Anglo-Saxon rhetoric to advocate Unrestricted Reciprocity.¹ In his “Introduction” and series of “Letters,” former Oxford don and Canadian controversialist Goldwin Smith laced his writing with racial arguments that would be echoed a few years later in his landmarkCanada and the Canadian Question. “Unifying forces of various Kinds are constantly, and with ever-increasing energy, drawing together the two portions...

Racial ideas figured prominently in America’s expansionist experiment in 1898. Walter LaFeber noted the “virulent strain of Anglo-Saxonism” that emerged among American intellectuals at the end of the century, including the “expansive expansionism.”¹ Ernest May and Richard Hofstadter also noted the influence of intellectuals such as Fiske and Josiah Strong, with Hofstadter writing that the “Anglo-Saxon dogma became the chief element in American racism in the imperial era.”² Other historians have explicitly explored the connection between race and American imperialism or expansionism, including the racial motives behind the Progressives’ support of imperialism.³ The United States did not go to war...

One month before the outbreak of war in South Africa, the African explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley published an article in the American journalOutlookentitled “Anglo-Saxon Responsibilities.” Stanley had been born in Wales as John Rowlands, hired on to an American merchant ship at fifteen, jumped ship in New Orleans, renamed himself, and fought on both sides of the American Civil War. As a reporter in 1872 he had gained fame as the man who tracked down another African explorer, David Livingstone. Stanley went on to make a name for himself as an explorer of the “dark continent” and...

Perhaps not since California in the 1840s had a New World territory captivated the imagination of North Americans as Alaska did at the turn of the century. As in California, the discovery of gold in the Yukon in 1897 and the consequent gold rush gave the cold wastelands of Alaska an aura of romance and adventure. “Ho, for the Klondike!” an article inMcClure’smagazine exclaimed in March, 1898, and claimed to inform readers of “The Various Ways In” and “How the Gold is Found and Where It is Got.” “It is no place,” the author warned, “for weak men,...

The same years that witnessed the end of the British war in South Africa and the settlement of the Alaska boundary dispute also saw the publication of two books calling for Anglo-Saxon union. In 1902 William T. Stead, the editor of the English journalReview of Reviews, published hisThe Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. Stead called for “merging the British Empire in the English-speaking United States of the World,” and substituting “the broader patriotism of the race” for “the insular patriotism of our nation.” Such a union would usher in a new era...