Nancy Isenberg. - White trash: the 400-year untold history of class in America /

Fascinating and unsettling... traces the long-standing codependency between Americas wealthy elites and the white underclass who have been a source of cheap labor since the founding of our country... [a] meticulously researched survey of the class system in America.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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

Formidable and truth-dealing... an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents.

The New York Times

[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 todays pundits proclaim.

Slate

Engaging... After reading this book you will never think of a trailer park the same way again.

Providence Journal

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.

Michael Eric Dyson, author of Tears We Cannot Stop and The Black Presidency

An eloquent synthesis of the countrys history of class stratification, one that questions whether the United States is indeed a place where all are created equal. White Trash powerfully unites four centuries of historyeconomic, political, cultural, and pseudoscientificto show how thoroughly the notion of class is woven into the national fabric.

The Boston Globe

With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classisms deep-seated roots.

Entertainment Weekly

A dizzying, dazzling four-hundred-year-long tour of American history from Pocahontas to Sarah Palin, seen from a vantage point that students of American history occupy all too rarely: that of the disposable citizens whose very presence disrupts what Isenberg calls our national hagiography.

The New Republic

A book that strikes blow after blow against our foundational myth of equality and boundless opportunity for he (and, much later, she) who would seize it... [Isenbergs] erudition is stunning.

The Dallas Morning News

A carefully researched indictment of a particularly American species of hypocrisy, and its deeply relevant to the pathologies of contemporary America.

The Christian Science Monitor

White Trash is certain to be controversial. No debate, however, can minimize the rigor of Isenbergs research, the clarity of her prose, or her courage in exploring this fraught subject. Hers is a book that should forever change the way we think and talk about class, which Isenberg suggests is the rotting stage upon which American democracy will either stand or fall.

The American Scholar

White Trash provides an honest (and therefore important) look at four centuries of misrepresentation and exploitationcomplete with the conventional wisdom, pseudoscience, and armchair anthropology that sustains it.

Rural American, In These Times

From the eugenics movement to the rise of the proud redneck, Isenberg portrays a very real and significant history of class privilege in the United States. A riveting thesis supported by staggering research.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From John Lockes plans for the colonies to twentieth-century eugenics, from the rise of Andrew Jackson to the modern Republican party, White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.

T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Custers Trials

To any and all who want to understand, and understand deeply, our present age of brutal inequality, here is a timely and essential book.

Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg reveals a dark and tangled American secret at the core of our history: the pervasive persistence of white poverty. She deftly explores the interplay of mockery and denial in treatments, historical and fictional, of hardships and limits in a supposed land of equal and abundant opportunity. Drawing upon popular media as well as historical sources, from past and present, she exposes harsh realities long kept hidden in plain sight.

Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of American Colonies and The Internal Enemy

PENGUIN BOOKS

WHITE TRASH

Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles 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 Louisiana State University and writes regularly for Salon.com. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

BY NANCY ISENBERG

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

BY NANCY ISENBERG WITH ANDRE W BURSTEIN

Madison and Jefferson

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

Published with a new preface in Penguin Books 2017

Copyright 2016, 2017 by Nancy Isenberg

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN 9781101608487

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover design: Jaya Miceli

Cover image: Cevdet Gkhan Palas/Getty Images

Version_4

In memory of Gerda Lerner and Paul Boyer

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670), British Print, #1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England

Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin, from Davy Crocketts Almanack of1837, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

Old Sug, from John Robbs Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

The Bad Bird and the Mudsill, Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863

Chart used at a fair in Kansas promoting fitter families and eugenic marriages (ca. 1929), Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania