White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America

The Resource White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America
Label
White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America
Title remainder
the 400-year untold history of class in America
Statement of responsibility
Nancy Isenberg
Creator
Author
Subject
Language
eng
Summary
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. 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, history professor Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America<U+0019>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 <U+0013>- 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<U+0019>s Great Society and they now 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
Cataloging source
YDXCP
Dewey number
305.5/0973
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
HN90.S6
LC item number
I84 2016
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
Target audience
adult

Context

Context of White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Union Presbyterian Seminary Libraries. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.