The New York Times bestseller A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for NonfictionOne of NPR’s 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head OnNPR’s Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great ReadsSan Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2016: 100 recommended booksA Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016Globe & Mail 100 Best of … Nonfiction Book of 2016
Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016
“Formidable and truth-dealing . . . necessary.” —The New York Times
“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” —O Magazine
In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.
“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always 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 who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies. 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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This is a collection of research on class in America. It’s an eye-opener to how America’s underbelly classes developed. Interesting read despite being didactic. Of interest to both those in the academic world and the casual reader.
Written with the grace of a superb novel and the forensic fervor of our finest historians, White Trash pokes and prods in the nooks and crannies of the American psyche, and travels the backroads and backwaters of our national self-image, in search of how class has been made and reshaped over the decades. This is breathtaking social history and dazzling cultural analysis at its best.
Well written. Belies the title. It is a sympathetic look at the poor people in the Appalachian hills. The author analyzes reasons for their poverty, lack of education and opportunity. Gives us a glimpse into their everyday lives and psychology.
This is an extraordinary work. The examination of how culture and class have impacted the country’s development both political and social is thorough and even handed. This a very readable work of scholarship. The historical arc it traces helps explain so much of where we are today. It is a fascinating read.
No, White Trash is not the latest southern Gothic pulp romance; rather, as its subtitle reads, it’s The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, a 2016 book by Nancy Isenberg.
In America we have a tendency to think of ourselves as a classless society, or at least one where anybody can move from the bottom to the top with hard work and maybe a little luck. In fact, Isenberg demonstrates that class has been more pervasive throughout American history than is usually thought, and that the lower classes are often kept that way through broad societal structures and social attitudes.
I think her analysis is especially strong in the antebellum South, where she shows that slavery not only kept blacks down, by force of law, but also kept lower-class whites in their place, because the best land was taken by the large plantation owners, with only marginal land left over for the small farmers. Moreover, even the low-wage labor–as farmhands, say, or domestic servants–that provided so much employment in the North was not available to Southern whites, since slaves did nearly all menial tasks (it’s hard to compete with a wage of zero). Even if you wanted to work your way up from the bottom in the antebellum South, there was really no path for you to take, so the poor “white trash” stayed that way.
I also enjoyed and found convincing her view that class lines had already hardened in the early colonial period, when the proprietors of the English colonies imported so-called “waste people” from rural areas of the British isles to settle the dangerous frontiers, only for upper-class landowners to come in later, after the frontier had been tamed, and take the best land for themselves from “squatters” who often had no titles to places they had been living for years.
Amusing (to me anyway) that my own home state of North Carolina was looked down in the colonial period on by the other colonies as a giant wasteland of poor, uneducated whites, more interested in drinking, screwing, and lazing about than working the land. In comparison to the tobacco plantations and more established society of Virginia, and the fertile lands of South Carolina that also quickly developed into plantation society, North Carolina was cursed with a lot of land too sandy, swampy, or hilly to be easy to farm. Such land attracted only economically marginal people from the fringes of Virginia, leading to a vicious circle of poverty, poor land, and lack of respect.
The book contains fascinating anecdotes and analysis throughout. One thing I found really interesting was the evolution of phraseology for the poor impoverished white lower classes–for example, the terms squatters and crackers prevailed in the early 1800s, while mudsills was a popular term in the mid-19th century, but the ever-popular white trash was first used in 1821 and had achieved widespread use by the 1850s. There are tons of little explanations of this sort, regarding all sorts of historical social phenomena, in every chapter.
If there is one disappointment, it’s the final chapter, when Isenberg takes her class analysis of American history and applies it to the current landscape, finding the existence of a persistent underclass in the United States to be a great injustice, and recommending a rather standard slate of Great Society-style interventions to change things. But–we’ve already tried your way, Ms. Isenberg, and it’s led to the widespread dissolution of traditional family structures among the poorer classes, leading to firmer entrenchment of those class divisions than ever before! If Ms. Isenberg had no especially creative new solutions to recommend, better to have left this chapter out entirely.
Despite that last chapter, I’m awarding this book my coveted “Shortcuts to Smartness” award, for providing informative reviews of nearly every important in American history from an unusual and profound perspective. It struck me as more convincing and better-researched than the superficially similar People’s History of the United States, the rather blinkered left-wing American history book from 1980 (Isenberg has citations, for one thing!). Isenberg’s book might not be as easy to read as the People’s History, a perpetual favorite among disaffected high school students, but its focus and research hold up a lot better. I’d recommend this for any student of American history who wants to know more about the important and under-researched issue of class.
A most interesting book of both the history and sociology of “class” in America. It speaks to issues of today!!
Explains Trump as much as anything I have read.
If you are a history buff this might be for you. I am reading it in an attempt to understand our current political situation and finding it hard going.
I recommend this to everyone. You’ll learn a lot about why our country is the way it is today.
If you want to understand poverty in the U S, this is the book to read.
Some of my ancestors are clearly White Trash. They had a difficult life, but some climbed out of the gutter — for which I am thankful.
Well written. this book is extremely well documented. I founds all the foot notes worth reading. It is seldom that my opinion is changed on any given matter, but this view of American social history has turned a few of my long-held beliefs up-side down.
Wonderful, insightful book of the start of America.
Repetitive and detailed – I generally like sociological books like this but there was too much detail and it moved along very slowly. However, well-researched.
It is sometimes a hard read because of how badly people both think of and tread people. The book gives a good history of the term “White Trash” and the reasons behind it. I also should encourage us to alway be mindful of those less fortunate people in our society the need assistance and action to reduce their state in life.
Interesting but repetitive. It kind of dragged along never ending style.
many people don’t understand the poor, much less their thought processes — the tragedy is that they have hopes and dreams that are often unrealized
I believe that Ms. Isenberg has some valid and legitimate points, and I agree that the recognition of the forgotten American underclass is a long overdue study of a socially and historically important and much overlooked subculture.
Unfortunately, however, her political biases lead her to make some blatantly false statements, and these only serve to undermine her credibility on this very important subject. The credibility gap that was created only served to both call her other facts into question and to reduce this book to a somewhat disappointing diatribe against the injustices, some real and some perceived, of the American societal milieu.
Gives a good picture of class relations over all of American history. Very interesting and enlightening.
A history or the white underclass that gives the lie to our belief that America is a classless society. The book makes it easier for a liberal like me to understand Donald Trump’s appeal to white working class men.