White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

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History & Foreign AffairsSociety & Culture

America was never the classless society of its founding myth. Isenberg follows a despised underclass of poor whites from English colonization to the late twentieth century, and you watch elites define them, use them as labor and keep renaming them, from waste people and clay eaters to crackers and white trash.

Core ideas
  • Imported hierarchy: English class structure crossed the Atlantic with the colonists, and colonial elites treated the poor as labor to be used.
  • Insults as politics: Labels like squatter, cracker and white trash marked sides in real political fights over land, not just social contempt.
  • Class through every era: The lens covers Franklin and Jefferson, the Civil War, eugenic sterilization, the New Deal, Jimmy Carter and the Bakkers.
Published2016
Pages460
ISBN9780670785971
ReadMar 2025

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