White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History Of Class In America

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In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, & reveals how the wretched & landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today`s hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century & the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted 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 & Lyndon B. Johnson`s Great Society; they are now offered up as entertainment in reality TV shows, & the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the centre of major political debates over the character of the American identity. Surveying political rhetoric & policy, popular literature & scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America`s supposedly class-free society
- where liberty & hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility
- & forces a nation to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class.