Now a New York Times bestseller

“This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”-–Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“White Trash will change the way we consider our past and present.”
—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Custer’s Trials

In her groundbreaking history of the class system in The us, what the New York Times hails as “formidable and truth-dealing,” Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, at all times embarrassing––if on occasion entertaining––poor white trash.
 
“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s at all times a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters boosting Trump have been a permanent a part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately referred to 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 The us’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to make sure 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 actually TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have at all times 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 can have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.