Purchase
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Viking
July 2016
On Sale: June 21, 2016
480 pages
ISBN: 0670785970
EAN: 9780670785971
Kindle: B016JPTQ9U
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In her groundbreaking history of the class system in
America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy
Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality,
uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always
embarrassing––if occasionally entertaining––poor white trash The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of
the earliest British colonial settlement. They were
alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,”
“lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the
downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and
“sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children
distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and
listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature
and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg
upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free
society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure
real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise
of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and
the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as
much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted
poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored
in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced
by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for
sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal
reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV
shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck
Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have
always been at or near the center of major political debates
over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our
nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will
have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature
of class as well.
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