White Trash

Resumen del libro

The New York Times BestsellerA ground-breaking history of the class system in America, which challenges popular myths about equality in the land of opportunity. In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, and reveals how the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. 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 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 Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; they are now offered up as entertainment in reality TV shows, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton.

Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the centre of major political debates over the character of the American identity. 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 - and forces a nation to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class.

Biografía del autor

Nancy Isenberg. Nueva Jersey (EE.UU.), 1958. Profesora de Historia en la Universidad Estatal de Luisiana. Su primer libro, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, examina los orígenes del movimiento por los derechos de las mujeres y obtuvo el premio anual de la Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) en 1999. Su segundo libro, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, que trataba de corregir la visión sesgada con la que a lo largo de dos siglos se ha retratado al vicepresidente de Thomas Jefferson, recibió elogios de la crítica, fue incluido en la Selección Principal del Club del Libro de Historia, ganó el Premio del Libro de Oklahoma 2008 de no ficción y fue finalista del Los Angeles Times Book Prize en la categoría de biografía. Su tercer libro, Madison and Jefferson, en coautoría con Andrew Burstein, fue un best seller del New York Times y fue elegido uno de los cinco mejores títulos de no ficción de 2010 por Kirkus. Con Burstein ha escrito también The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality. Isenberg ha aparecido en C-SPAN2 Book TV y en varios programas de NPR. Ha publicado artículos en New York Review of Books, Washington Post, American Scholar, Chronicle of Higher Education, Journal of American History, American Quarterly y Hedgehog Review. Burstein y ella colaboran regularmente en Salon.com y publican escritos sobre asuntos políticos y culturales de actualidad para varios medios.