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Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: December 2022 and January 2023 (0 comment)
It may be a new year, this may be a list of new books, but our love for literature in translation hasn’t changed at all, and we are so pleased to be enthusiastically recommending these recent releases. On this list, you’ll find a Spanish novel where controversy swirls around a Coca-Cola billboard...
Read More»
  • Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (1 comment)

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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

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ISBN13: 9780143129677
ISBN10: 0143129678
Condition: Standard


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Staff Pick

This biography of an unseen, much-maligned people lays bare brutal American prejudice. Eye-opening. Recommended By Gin E., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

The New York Times Besteller, with a new preface from the author. 

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

"This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant." — O, The Oprah Magazine

"White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present."  — T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials

In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list, takes on our comforting myths about equality, 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 that put Trump in 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.

Review

"Formidable and truth-dealing…necessary." The New York Times

Review

"Isenberg...has written an important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress." TIME

Review

"[White Trash] sheds bright light on a long history of demagogic national politicking, beginning with Jackson. It makes Donald Trump seem far less unprecedented than today’s pundits proclaim." Slate

Review

"A bracing reminder of the persistent contempt for the white underclass." The Atlantic

Review

"An eloquent synthesis of the country’s history of class stratification." The Boston Globe

Review

"A gritty and sprawling assault on…American mythmaking." Washington Post

About the Author

Nancy Isenberg is the author of the New York Times bestselling White Trash: the 400 year untold story of class in America, and Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography and won the Oklahoma Book Award for best book in Nonfiction. She is the coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson. She is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at LSU, and writes regularly for Salon.com. Isenberg is the winner of the 2016 Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Average customer rating 4.5 (2 comments)

`
Dr. Richard Burkhart , July 28, 2018 (view all comments by Dr. Richard Burkhart )
Nancy Isenberg shines a harsh spotlight on how the fortunes of the few were founded on the exploitation and debasement of the many, even though white. She goes all the way back to Jamestown and the Puritans, with plenty on the founding fathers, Andrew Jackson, squatters vs. slaves, sharecroppers, up to Elvis Presley and more recent politicians and media. Yet I found it surprising that the actual economics behind the evolving class structure is mentioned only in passing. For example, there is a lot more to the Civil War, both locally and globally, than the conventional race and class narrative. Later she talks about suburbia and “trailer trash” without saying anything about the car culture and its roots in oil, or of the corrupting effects of easy money, whether true gold, white gold (cotton), or black gold (oil). Likewise we get only glimpses of the evolving subcultures of the white underclass, typically only through commentary on popular media and political figures instead of authentic accounts. An unexpected but persistent theme is breeding, with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson sounding like British aristocrats, consigning the “low bred” to eternal poverty, or a century later subject to eugenics sterilization. Nevertheless, this fascinating book shows that there is a big opening for a progressive politics of bottom-up inclusion, of black and white together, a Bernie Sanders type New Deal politics, or the unity politics of William Barber’s “Poor People’s Campaign”.

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equivalence , May 02, 2017 (view all comments by equivalence)
This book complements "The People's History of The United States" by the esteemed populist historian Howard Zin. Isenberg considers the centuries old origins of terms like "crackers" and "white trash"[the later since 1850]. She looks at colorful figures like the "hill-billy" President Andrew Jackson and his circle, on up to recent personalities such as Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin. All being considered as belonging to the often disrespected, sometimes bullied, white underclass which has always verged on being the majority of Whites. I am mystified,however,by Isenberg's failure to discuss Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's great Black ally, Frederick Douglass recognized Lincoln's poorly regarded origins. The eminent Black intellectual W.E.B. Bubois,in 1922 wrote of Lincoln as "...a Southern poor white,of illegitimate birth, poorly educated & unusually ugly, ill-dressed. He liked smutty jokes." Lincoln's contemporary, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio privately wrote that Lincoln was "...born of poor white trash and educated in a slave state(Kentucky)". Perhaps half of the Whites who have lived in, or are living today in The United States could be considered as living "hand-to-mouth". Whether any eventually become rich or President,or not,is no reason to diss them. Self-respect comes from or is part of respecting others, regardless of fickle "success".

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780143129677
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
04/04/2017
Publisher:
Penguin Books
Pages:
496
Height:
1.20IN
Width:
5.40IN
Author:
Nancy Isenberg
Media Run Time:
B

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