The first third of the book provides an erudite romp as Isenberg schools us on how settlers within North America who were detached from land ownership were viewed as “beggarly spawn”. (This book may contain a small, black sharpie mark on the bottom edge, so that it can't be returned to a different wholesaler.Nancy Isenberg’s historical treatise about class in America offers rich insights into current political fault lines. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies.

Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. “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.

400 years white trash