ABSTRACT
The anthropological tradition that developed in the United States in the wake of the Revolutionary War was shaped by three overriding concerns: creating a national identity, episodic westward expansion and settlement in the Indian territories, and consolidating a slave-based economy in the southern states. The American Indians were not distinguished from Europeans by differences in morality, intelligence, and strength, and their skin color was only slightly different from that of Europeans who lived in the Mediterranean. The idea of white racial superiority became an increasingly prominent feature of everyday discourse in America during the 1830s and 1840s. As American expansion westward proceeded during the 1840s, American travelers increasingly portrayed the peoples of Mexico’s northern provinces as a mixed or “mongrel” race with considerable Indian blood. In 1878, Henry Morgan traveled to the Southwest where he visited existing Pueblos and studied the ruins of several abandoned ones.
