Overview

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. In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. 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. 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. 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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9781515955443

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Reviews

This is breathtaking social history and dazzling cultural analysis at its best. ---Michael Eric Dyson, author of Holler if You Hear Me

Author Information

Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography and won the Oklahoma Book Award for best book in nonfiction. She is also coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson. Actress Kirsten Potter has performed on stage, film, and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy. Her narrations have won AudioFile Earphones Awards, and she earned an Audie nomination for her reading of Rise Again by Ben Tripp.

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