The Conquest of a Continent

Madison Grant traces the ethnography of the North American continent. Grant details the history of various ethnic groups on the continent, from Colonial times to the mid 20th century. Central is the dominant role that the Nordic race (particularly Anglo-Saxon and Ulster-Scots) played in the conquest and founding of the United States.


Madison Grant, author of The Conquest of a Continent: or The Expansion of Races in America (1933), and, previously, The Passing of the Great Race (1916) was much discussed and reviewed in his own time, and into the 21st century by both detractors and admirers, whether in qualified or very strident terms. This prominent naturalist, zoologist, and benefactor still casts a shadow over many aspects of the human condition and the issues of "race," national identity, immigration, and the potential role of scientific methods in improving racial stock: points of contention that have never faded. He is a progressive and a man of science; an elitist; and a conservationist (or "environmentalist" in contemporary parlance). In this, what his colleague, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, called in the introduction, "the first racial history of America," Grant provides a consistent theme--Nordicism and the need to preserve the Nordic racial type in America--but can be contradictory and inconsistent in finding the means to achieve this ultimate conservationist agenda.