First published 2016
Nancy Isenberg examines the persistent underclass that America prefers to ignore. Her investigation spans from colonial settlements to modern reality television, tracking the people dismissed as "waste people," "offals," "crackers," and "white trash." Isenberg argues that class divisions have shaped American politics as powerfully as race, challenging the national mythology of social mobility through hard work. She shows how poor whites drove the early Republican Party's rise and how class tensions fueled the Civil War alongside slavery. Her analysis connects Reconstruction conflicts between impoverished whites and freed slaves to the eugenics movement that Theodore Roosevelt supported. The story continues through New Deal programs and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to contemporary culture. Isenberg demonstrates that marginalized whites have remained central to debates about American identity across four hundred years. The book forces readers to confront class as an enduring force in American society, just as the nation has slowly acknowledged racial injustice.
Genres: 20th-century, class, social-issues, non-fiction, 21st-century, american-history
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-perspective, social-commentary
Setting: America, United States
Period: Colonial Era, Civil War, Reconstruction, New Deal, Great Society
460 pages · Hardcover · Viking Pr
Content warnings: racism