ABSTRACT
The use of the ideology for national claims weakened as sectarian strife emerged in America and issues of racial and genetic minority rose to the fore. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism underwent a series of sizable changes that eventually led to its attrition, though not its permanent annihilation. It is important to note that following Thomas Jefferson's successful institution of Saxon ideas during the American Revolutionary period, Anglo-Saxonism as a general ideology attracted other nations. More nations envisioned the Saxon claim—an imagined right to trace their roots, government, and people to a superior and noble breed of humans—as their own. Since the myth spoke loosely of a regional golden age wherein Anglo-Saxons had enjoyed freedoms and liberties unknown since the Norman invasion, it offered a binary formula through which the powerful could remain in control. The Saxon-Norman divisions continued as various national histories captured the Norman Yoke issue in descriptive narratives, especially as each nation claimed a part of "Anglo-Saxonism" for themselves.
