#aryanism

In fact, Freeman, usually reckoned as the ultimate empiricist, worked out a comprehensive racial theory, ultimately Aryan rather than Teutonic. His ideas on race were for a time influential, particularly in America. He was one of the founders of academic history both as a writer and as an Oxford academic and was an indefatigable publicist of his own ideas, as a journalist, essayist, lecturer, and writer for children. He maintained important personal contacts with a wide circle of academics, publishers and politicians—men like James Bryce, William Stubbs and J. R. Green, Sir George Cox, a friend of his youth and later the author of The mythology of the Aryan nations, Boyd Dawkins, professor of geology, and the philologists A. H. Sayce and Max Miiller. He travelled widely and acquired academic and political links with Switzerland, Germany, Greece and the Balkans, and with America as a result particularly of his visit to Johns Hopkins university where he impressed H. B. Adams who found in him a like mind. His academic and political honours symbolized the extent of his Aryan world, which stretched from ’ New England’ (for him a wider domain, by far, than in conventional usage) to Russia and the Balkans. Every major piece of history he wrote was informed by, or influential upon, his developing theory of race. A great campaigner, he had no hesitation in using his talent and reputation as an historian for writing didactic histories as background to contemporary issues. His most famous dictum, ‘History is past politics; politics are present history’, inscribed on the library wall at Johns Hopkins,[6] meant not only that history was political history but that the unity of history, his constant theme, ensured the relevance of the past to the issues of the present