Word: anglo-saxon
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...position in the axis of a communication system of Roman roads, Winchester can certainly be judged an important Roman country town. Winchester's prominence in British history grew after the Anglo-Saxon invasions as Winchester became the capital city of the Kings of Wessex, and, in effect, the capital of England. The legends of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights are associated with sixth-century Winchester, and in the tenth century, Winchester prospered as a continentally known precinct of learning and education under Alfred the Great...
Once upon a time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants-Puritans and the children of Puritans-clamped a code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model-the only model-for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability...
...guess that the most talented playwright in American history was a black Irishman named Eugene O'Neill, or that the wisest philosopher was a half-Spaniard, George Santayana. One would never suspect that America's only native art, jazz, was the invention of Americans who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor white...
...death penalty has been abolished before in Anglo-Saxon law. William the Conqueror banished it during his reign (1066-87), though he did not object to criminals being mutilated. But a few years later, Henry I (1100-35) permitted the ax and rope to return, and by the 16th century, offenders were also being drowned, drawn and quartered and boiled to death for crimes that ranged from cutting down a tree to stealing property worth more than a shilling. Traitors were hanged, then cut down while still alive, disemboweled so that their innards could be burned before their eyes, then...
...destruction of the Indian meant to them, to America as a nation, and in time, to the land itself. As a result of this political and moral breakdown, year by year, tribe by tribe, lie by lie, the destiny of "this great experiment in democratic government under the Anglo-Saxon race," as expansionist pamphleteers called it, was made manifest by men who killed for Gold and God and proclaimed, "The destiny of the aborigines is written in characters not to be mistaken. The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon...