Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.
To you. And to a bunch of people who have to live in fear of being canceled - a.k.a., fired for - in the case of historians - reminding the world of uncomfortable truths.
Just as an illustration of why the term "Anglo-Saxon" muddles things, we have the person in the article who seems to think that Murphy is an Anglo-Saxon surname, when it is clearly Celtic in origin. I'm not doubting that the author is Anglo-Saxon... just pointing out that his suname, itself, is not.
I'm not a historian, so I'm just relating the parts of the issue that I understand. There are articles online by historians that go into greater depth explaining why historians tend to avoid the term "Anglo-Saxon" these days, and why the term became so popular in the 18th and 19th century.
Not sure what "uncomfortable truth" you are referring to. If you have something to say, spit it out. I also don't understand why someone would "fear being canceled" just because they used a somewhat obsolete term.
Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports.
PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon
There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges.
Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride.
There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic.
To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs.
Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
The bigger question is whether we want to.
As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English.
I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too?
Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
methinks, the Protestant elite wanted to keep out the Catholics
This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.
https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a...
At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.
Take an ancestry / 23andme/ myheritage test and see what comes up. You would be surprised.
Are not all black people Yoruba? (Well, of course they aren't...)
It also doesn't help that our literary sources for this period are very few, non-contemporary (i.e., talking about what happened a few centuries ago), and reliant on state societies talking about non-state societies. Naturally, they use inconsistent terminology for talking about the ethnicity of who is where, and the term "Saxon" appears to be pretty interchangeable for much of northern Germany. The modern term "Anglo-Saxon" thus effectively means "English German," arising largely to distinguish the Saxons who lived in England from those who lived in Germany.
Functionally speaking, you can divide the ethnicities of Britain into 5: the original Celtic speakers, the Romanized Celtics who were part of the province of Britannia, the first wave of Germanic immigrants (Anglo-Saxons), the second wave of Germanic immigrants (the Norse), and the third wave of Germanic immigrants (the Normans), this one largely limited to a very small ruling class.
One question, do the Normans count as Germanic? I thought they were from Scandinavia originally and then spent enough time in France to pick up the language?
It is much less clear if Normans should also count as Germanic. I wrote it as such mostly for the pun of having England be invaded by three waves of Germanic peoples from three different places. The actual reality is murkier, as the Normans themselves are an amalgamation of existing Breton, Gallo-Romanic, and Frankish (another Germanic people!) peoples with a hefty Norse influx both before and after the ceding of territory to Rollo. It's probably more accurate to say that the Normans represent a new cultural identity which is a fusion of several that came before it, just as the English did with their several invasions, or the French did during their centralization push in the Early Modern.
But that's surely an anachronism, since correctly it would need to be "Danish German"?