Anglo-Saxons
Outside Anglophone countries, both in Europe and in the rest of the world, the term "Anglo-Saxon" and its direct translations are used to refer to the Anglophone peoples and societies of Britain, the United States, and other countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand – areas which are sometimes referred to as the Anglosphere. The term "Anglo-Saxon" can be used in a variety of contexts, often to identify the English-speaking world's distinctive language, culture, technology, wealth, markets, economy, and legal systems. Variations include the German "Angelsachsen", French "Anglo-Saxon", Spanish "anglosajón", Portuguese "Anglo-saxão", Russian "англосаксы", Polish "anglosaksoński", Italian "anglosassone", Catalan "anglosaxó" and Japanese "Angurosakuson". As with the English-language use of the term, what constitutes the "Anglo-Saxon" varies from speaker to speaker.
Anglo-Saxons
Throughout the history of the Anglo-Saxons studies producing a dispassionate narrative of the people has been difficult. In the early Middle Ages the views of Geoffrey of Monmouth produced a personally inspired history that wasn't challenged for five hundred years. In the Reformation, churchmen looking for signs of an English church reinterpreted Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In the 19th century the term "Anglo-Saxon" was broadly used in philology, and is sometimes so used at present. In Victorian Britain, some writers such as Robert Knox,
James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley and Edward A. Freeman used the term "Anglo-Saxon" to justify racism and imperialism, claiming that the "Anglo-Saxon" ancestry of the English made them racially superior to the colonised peoples. Similar racist ideas were advocated in the 19th-century United States by Samuel George Morton and George Fitzhugh. These views have influenced how versions of early English history are embedded in the sub-conscious of people "re-emerging in school textbooks and television programmes and still very congenial to some strands of political thinking."