Remembering Top History Professor Reginald Horsman

Reginald Horsman. (fair use).

Dr. Reginald Horsman, 93, who spent his entire 41-year career as a UW-Milwaukee history professor, died August 20th in Milwaukee, where he resided at Saint John’s on the Lake. A native of Leeds, England, with a Ph.D. from Indiana University, he was hired by UWM in 1958, and served until his retirement in 1999. In 1973, he was the first UWM scholar to be named a “Distinguished Professor.” (There have been seventy-one named since.)

According to his obituary:

His most influential work, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1986) is widely regarded as a landmark in the study of American racial ideology. The book traced the origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism and its role in shaping 19th-century U.S. expansionist thought. Hailed at the time of its publication as “a work of monumental scope” that “permanently changed the accepted scholarly understanding of racial Anglo-Saxonism,” it remains in use in university classrooms today and continues to shape historical discourse on race and nationalism in America.

Dr. Horsman makes his point in the very first paragraph of the book’s forward:

By 1850 American expansionism was viewed in the United States less as a victory for the principles of free democratic republicanism than as evidence of the innate superiority of the American Anglo-Saxon branch of the Caucasian race. … In the middle of the nineteenth century a sense of racial destiny permeated discussions of American progress and of future American world destiny. … This was a superior race, and inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction.”

The Department of Homeland Security Begs to Differ

On July 23rd, less than a month before Horsman’s death, the Department of Homeland Security, which has shown an unusual interest in art history, posted an image of an 1872 painting entitled “American Progress,” in which a white-robed Caucasian goddess of plenty floats above settlers seeking their Manifest Destiny in the Wild West. Meanwhile, in the shadows to her left, Native Americans cower and run from the onslaught sure to follow. It’s a lousy painting, but fairly accurately represents the mentality of the age as Horsman saw it.

DHS looked at things differently, captioning its post on X, which has been viewed 17 million times, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.

American Progress – John Gast pic.twitter.com/agU6bl8TZ8

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 23, 2025

The New York Times was among news outlets to take note of the post, and published an article on August 28th entitled Homeland Security’s Embrace of Art Reopens an Old Debate:

To the Trump administration, the painting epitomizes patriotism and the progress spread by American pioneers advancing technology, democracy and the blessings of Western civilization. Some historians, however, say, that D.H.S.’s battle cry, in the context of the painting, glorifies racism and glosses over just whose homeland America is.

The heritage exemplified by Gast’s painting, they say, neglects to acknowledge that much of the homeland Americans are being exhorted to defend belonged to Mexicans and Indigenous tribes who were forcibly removed or died of cholera spread by white settlers.

“The ironies are profound,” Martha A. Sandweiss, an emerita history professor at Princeton University and the founder and director of The Princeton Slavery Project, said in an interview. “The painting … does not depict people defending their homeland. On the contrary, it depicts a group of white men (and an angel-like woman wearing a ‘Star of Empire’) invading the homeland of others.”

This was precisely the message that Dr. Horsman was among the first to spread.

Funeral Services Set

Visitation for Reginald Horsman will be held Saturday, September 6th from 10:30 a.m. until noon, with a service and luncheon to follow at Feerick Funeral Home, 2025 E. Capitol Drive, Shorewood.