White Trash Book Pdf

WHITE TRASH The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America By Nancy Isenberg Illustrated. No line about class in the United States is more famous than the one written by the.

A familiar tale about class in America gets a poor retelling in a new book.

OFFICIAL BOOK DESCRIPTION: In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if occasionally entertaining––poor white trash. Free download or read online Trash pdf (ePUB) book. The first edition of this novel was published in 2010, and was written by Andy Mulligan. The book was published in multiple languages including English language, consists of 240 pages and is available in Hardcover format.

Nancy Isenberg has produced, in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, a dreadfully stupid and lazy book. It is badly written, poorly conceived, and incompetently executed. Isenberg would join the long line of American debunkers and would-be debunkers of a familiar and surpassingly tedious sort: “Sure, Americans sent a man to the moon, but what about the United Fruit Company in Guatemala back in 1954? Huh? Huh?”

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Isenberg’s argument, if we may be so generous as to call it that, is this: The American culture was not born ex nihilo on July 4, 1776, and in the English parts of the New World colonists reproduced some form of the English class structure; the freedom-seeking Puritans were not alone, but were joined by all manner of riff-raff dispatched by English powers as a form of domestic social hygiene, making the United States a kind of Australia before there was an Australia; the United States today is not a society without class divisions.

Well, raise my rent.

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Virginia was named for an English queen and its settlement was sponsored by a knight. Its basic law was a royal charter, and its economy was shaped in no small part by indentured servitude and chattel slavery. These are not egalitarian arrangements, and they did not produce egalitarian outcomes. This is not “untold history.” This is history told, and told, and told again. Life in early-17th-century Jamestown, Isenberg tells us, was not unlike the world of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; what we are to take from the fact that an English settlement was culturally consistent with the work of an English playwright working at approximately the same time (1596 in this case) is anybody’s guess.

About 20 pages in, I found myself thinking: “I wonder when we get to NASCAR?” Obviously, you cannot have an intellectually lazy and cliché-ridden book about white-trash culture without NASCAR, preferably with a tangential report on the box-office performance of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. That would be like having a batty and ignorant book on African-American culture without fried chicken and watermelon. Rest assured, you’ll get your NASCAR, your Dukes of Hazzard, and more.

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But it’s a while coming. The structure of the book reeks of sophomore-level procrastination. Perhaps this will be more obvious to you if you’ve ever been obliged to write something long and complicated on a deadline and performed poorly. (Not that I would know anything about that.) The first chapter of the book is the book essay, a distillation of the book’s argument that usually is submitted to publishers as part of a book proposal. You aren’t supposed to publish the book essay, but Isenberg seems to have done that or something quite close to it. So what we have is a brief version of the book’s overall argument, followed by a series of half-thought-out chapters in which we are treated to reports on Thomas Jefferson and class, the Civil War and class, the Great Depression and class, each connected only vaguely, if at all, with the others, and an epilogue.

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You will not be surprised to learn that Jefferson had attitudes about class that were more or less characteristic of a man of his day, and that popular attitudes toward the subject changed slowly over time in response to historical events. It may be that all of this could add up to an illuminating account of class differences in the United States, and maybe even an account of persistent social injustice of a kind, but, if it does, that has escaped Isenberg entirely.

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She does not even seem to read her own sentences, at least as they relate to one another in sequence, e.g.: “[Benjamin] Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries.” I found myself blinking and rereading that sentence, and wondering how and why a man who was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor should design a charity hospital for their benefit. It is true that Franklin, like charitable men before and after and now, distinguished between different kinds of poor people, between the so-called deserving poor and ordinary bums, partly as a moral exercise and partly as a kind of philanthropic triage, resources being limited. But there is not an ordinary reading of the English words “was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor” that describes a man who undertook to relieve the plight of the poor through charitable works.

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Franklin particularly perplexes and vexes Isenberg. He was a fugitive from an apprenticeship to his older brother (a form of indenture) and was from a family of modest means. Isenberg writes: “He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.” Given this fact, she is scandalized by Franklin’s later complaints about “vagrant and idle persons” congregating in Philadelphia. (The more things change . . .) One wonders whether Isenberg has ever been to America. Franklin, as Isenberg might learn from reading Isenberg, was a man who began with very little and who managed to rise in Philadelphia — and rise and rise until he became its most celebrated resident — despite being an outsider to the Quaker mafia that ran the place and having no real connections to the “Proprietors,” the Penns and allied families who dominated the colony socially and economically. How did that happen? Isenberg knows: “Quaker patrons,” including the lawyer Alexander Hamilton (no relation to that guy Aaron Burr shot), “a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party,” along with “liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party.” Which is to say, Franklin rose in no small part through his own hard work and cunning but was also enabled by an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, commercial society in which one’s original station in life was not necessarily one’s final station — i.e., he rose because of the very American order whose liberality this daft book was written to debunk.

Perhaps Franklin appalls Isenberg because he is recognizably the first modern American, and he talked like one.

Isenberg has a habit of doing that to herself. Hilariously, she argues that one of the problems with westward expansion was that the settlers’ class positions became less secure the farther they traveled from the eastern colonial capitals. That is, of course, the founding idea of the American meritocratic ethos and the related myth of a classless American society. The old divisions really did melt away in the refining fires of the frontier — only to be replaced with new ones. Isenberg writes as though class politics in the United States were a seamless continuation of British class politics (French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, German-speaking, and Russian-speaking America effectively do not exist in her account), when in reality they constitute something closer to an inversion of them. If an Englishman today has the wrong accent and failed to go to the right schools, it doesn’t matter how much money he has; if an American has enough money, nobody cares what sort of funky, plebeian manner of speech he has (cf. Trump, Donald, yugeness of) or whether he went to school at all — in fact, we tend to celebrate those who come from outside the Ivy League–Wall Street world much more intensely than those who merely advance a few degrees within it. If you’re the 14th Earl of Derby and just Derbying on the way the 13th did before you, the English class system regards you with some awe; if you’re the ninth Biddle to be chairman of the Merion Cricket Club membership committee, the American system thinks you should have maybe tried harder in school or gotten an MBA or something.

Perhaps Franklin appalls Isenberg because he is recognizably the first modern American, and he talked like one. “I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty but leading or driving them out of it.” Is that Ben Franklin or Paul Ryan?

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Eventually, we get to the modern era, and the sympathetic Joads of Isenberg’s imagination become objects of her contempt, from those NASCAR-watching, Burt Reynolds–impersonating hordes to Sarah Palin, who inspires a hatred in Isenberg that is unpleasant to witness on the page and must be absolutely manic in person. She repeats Slate’s report that Palin’s home town of Wasilla, Alaska, is just a place to “get gas and pee,” but she writes as one who obviously never has stopped there, or watched a Lady Wildcats game with bar patrons in Harlan, Ky., or stopped to talk with foot-washing Baptists praying for rain in a cotton field outside Brownfield, Texas. Well, if the bright kids at Slate say so, it must be true.

Isenberg teaches at Louisiana State, having studied at Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin. Her book inevitably will be compared — poorly — with J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. In Isenberg, there is no sense of knowing this culture and its people. By her own telling, her interest in the subject is rooted in To Kill a Mockingbird (the film, not the book), and her work is full of such information as can be had from Google or in a classroom in Madison. As for the people, they’re mainly just evidence to be mustered against the Great Satan that is American capitalism, or else, like Sarah Palin, characters in Isenberg’s white-minstrel-show version of history. There may come a time when the members of the white underclass decide that they do not want or need nice liberal ladies from Rutgers, who get so much wrong speaking about them, to speak for them. But for those of Isenberg’s disposition, the poor are very little more than pawns, and in the end it doesn’t matter very much whether you’re playing the white side of the chess board or the black.

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Preview — White Trash by Nancy Isenberg

In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if occasionally entertaining––'poor white trash.'
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British col
...more
Published June 21st 2016 by Viking
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Popular Answered Questions
Scott PakudaitisBecause this book is about the class structure in America. It was not meant to be an all-inclusive survey of class throughout the world.
Sarah SmithersIt was fascinating to me...I am so glad I read this, and especially now, as it explains to me what the heck is happening in the country..
Apparently ,…more
It was fascinating to me...I am so glad I read this, and especially now, as it explains to me what the heck is happening in the country..
Apparently , it's nothing new.
She laid out the history of the founding of this country and what was happening and how the governing guys tried to do something about the poor and the vagabonds and the squatters....and it was very easy to follow.
And then delved into politicians trying to court the trash vote while legislating against them..
I'm recommending this to all my friends..
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Rating details

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Oct 14, 2016Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it
”The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across centuries attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.”
My mom was always rather class conscious. I’d make a new friend at school, and the first thing my mother would do was go through my new
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Sep 15, 2016Navidad Thélamour rated it really liked it
Shelves: full-review, cultural-surveys, non-fiction, given-to-me-by-publisher, read-2016
“If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan…”
Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is a tour de force of research and hard-hitting assessments of our country’s attitude toward the “poor” and “shiftless” masses. It delves into the historical inaccuracies and missteps of a nation, our nati
...more
Mar 09, 2017Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing
Shelves: american-history, books-of-the-year-2016, nonfiction, brain-candy, economics
“All history is the history of class struggle.” Sound familiar? It should. Well, the actual quote from, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto, is “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, but it gets the job done, however transmogrified it might have been in popular recollection and various translations. And it may or not be the case. Certainly in America one is considered suspect for subscribing to the notio...more
Nov 07, 2017Miranda Reads rated it liked it
I initially read the title and reserved this book under the impression that this would be a humorous look into white trash history.
I assumed wrong.
This was the history of the poor, white American as I've never heard it before.
Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty.
The history (unsurprisingly) constantly cycles - going from
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Sep 28, 2016Matt rated it really liked it
In All the King’s Men, Robert Penn’s classic novel of American politics, the protagonist is Willie Stark, the demagogic and corrupt governor of an unnamed state (Willie is based on Huey Long of Louisiana). The tragedy of Willie – and All the King’s Men is an archetypal tragedy – is that he started out as a good man. He was a backcountry bumpkin who managed to rise out of poverty to become an idealistic young lawyer. Willie runs for County Treasurer promising transparency and honesty. He loses to...more
This was a fascinating history from beginning to end, maybe more so because this history has not entirely played out. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg shows the ways in which Americans have both recognized and embodied the lower classes of our society. This bottom rung of American society has variously been denigrated as waste people, offals, lubbers, clay eaters, rednecks, hillbillies and perhaps most famously, white trash. The examination of white...more
While reading this extraordinary history of the white underclass in America, I was reminded of how much of my life was spent in and around house trailers. I’m not talking about those doublewide, wannabe condos with designer touches, landscaped lawns, and air-conditioned club houses a short golf-cart ride away. I’m talking about 10-12 feet wide, 60-80 feet long pill-shaped homes that still have the tires attached. My mom and dad brought me home to such a trailer when I was born. Almost all of my...more
Jul 18, 2016Catherine rated it liked it
Shelves: 2016, england, mainstream-us, colonialism, work, class, history, rural
Of the good: Isenberg argues that we do not give the history of poor whites nearly the due it deserves, and makes a striking claim for the centrality of that history to any understanding of the United States. It's a provocative position, and one that she makes good with - following her train of thought from the colonial period to the present day, it's clear that we are a nation obsessed with class distinctions, peddling a mythology of the exact opposite.
Of the not-so good: Isenberg does not give
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2.5 star to be fair. It's written poorly, first of all. It could easily have been edited to half of its size for the pure information it contained in total. It's verbose and with immense repetition of basically what is a colonist theory detailing to origins of present class barriers in the USA. As if the point that there ARE definitive class bars and levels within the USA and that it is not a classless society just because it is a republic is some kind of epiphany. It's hard for me to imagine an...more
This book could easily be the only American history book that one would need to read to gain a greater understanding on the socio-economic problems in America. I'm not sure how I found it, but this book is one of the most informative books that I will probably read this year. Because of this book, I refuse to have any discussions about racism in the United States unless the conversation includes a willingness to take a historical 'step back' & understand how classism & capitalism has fai...more
Nancy Isenberg's tome on the history of poor whites in America is expansive and thorough. Starting with the earliest colonists and progressing to modern day America, she illuminates the somewhat hidden history of poor white families in their many incarnations over the past four centuries. Spoiler alert: rich white men have always hated poor white men only slightly less than they hate brown people.
While I must respect the research and effort that went into this volume, I admit that it was very ha
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Jan 27, 2017Margitte rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: american-author, reviewed, 2016-releases, 2017-read, american-history, nonfiction
Much has been said about the subject of slavery in America, mostly focusing on black slavery, conjuring up images of powerless people being shipped over in horrific conditions. Most people in the world regard it as a vile chapter in history, and a part of history that disgraced Americans and Brits as well.
A few quotes from the book to set the tone and wet the appetite:
(view spoiler)[America was conceived of in paradoxical terms: at once a land of fertility and possibility and a place of outstan
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Apr 29, 2017Jan Rice rated it liked it
Shelves: sociology, audio, politics, history, economics, them-and-us
I have thought of the problem of confining people in classes, castes and races as roughly analogous to curtailing the varieties of seeds and plants: you never know which ones will grow and thrive in the changing environment and which will now fail. If you've suppressed or gotten rid of all but the few that do well in the immediate situation, what will happen when things change and the only ones now available aren't suited to survive?
America is a case in point. Everyone knows we were started by
...more
Jun 27, 2016Clif Hostetler rated it liked it
White trash book isenberg
This is a history focused on the permanent underclass of a theoretically classless society. The United States aspires to live by its founding declaration that, 'all men are created equal.' So how can class be an issue?(view spoiler)[That is a satirical rhetorical question. (hide spoiler)]
The jarring insensitivity of the title for this book prompts me to begin this review by making a few comments about it. After all I presume readers of my reviews are polite company, and the term 'white trash' is
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actually, like a 3.75 rounded up
I absolutely have to thank the publisher for my copy. I was on the edge of buying this book when I got the email, so thanks very, very much.
I didn't actually read this book in two days, so don't let the starting/ending dates fool you. I don't think you can read this book in that amount of time since there's a wealth of information to sift through here. There is a more expanded version of this post at my reading journal, so feel free to go long or to take the sho
...more
Sep 17, 2017Paula Kalin rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Recommended to Paula by: Will Byrnes
Shelves: audio-book, non-fiction, published-2016, history, read-in-2017
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg is quite an eye opener. This is a 400 year US history lesson that states class has been with us since the Mayflower landed. I thought the British sent all their convicts to Australia to colonize, but I had little clue that the same happened in America. She talks about the white poor and slavery from the days of Franklin, Jefferson, the Civil War, LBJ to the present. Though the names given to the white and landless poor have differed over the years, they have always...more
We American fancy ourselves classless. We tell ourselves that with hard work, anyone can succeed -- like the runaway waif Ben Franklin. And while we admit that America began as a slave state, we often think that white supremacy is a thing of the past. And that African-Americans can achieve anything they want... with a little hard work.
Nancy Isenberg deconstructs this myth in her excellent history, 'White Trash.'
In it, she takes a long, hard look at America's elite and how they have denigrated
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White Trash Book Summary

Dec 11, 2016Lata rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Thoughts later.
Waiting for a hardcopy from the library so I can revisit points and collect my thoughts.
This book made me think. A lot.
Jun 23, 2016Book Riot Community added it
“Waste people.” “Offals.” “Rubbish.” “Lazy lubbers.” “Crackers.” These are some of the names given to the poor in America spanning from colonial times to the present day, where the term “white trash” has taken over. Isenberg offers a fascinating, detailed examination of class system in America, and how class issues involving poor people have played a part in shaping America and historical events for the past four hundred years, from the earliest British colonial settlement to Here Comes Honey Bo...more
It’s an impossible task really. 400 years of class in America concentrating on the white poor. Despite it’s brick-like size it can only do so much and this focus is off putting with the noticeable avoidance of black slavery and native peoples. But Isenberg is up front, she’s interested in examining crackers, rednecks, hillbillies and the titular white trash.
I’m a Canadian so I have no idea what gets taught in schools across the United States. I’m sure it’s as defanged and sterilized as what we
...more
Mar 07, 2017Ginger Stephens rated it did not like it
The question that I found myself asking throughout the whole book: How do you turn a book about white trash into boring academia? On the whole I found this book confusing. It started out with a discussion of the Ewells from 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' so it seemed to start in a spot that most Americans understand. Then, it lost its way. I suspect that Nancy Isenberg does not understand the difference between being poor and being white trash. All Southerners know the difference. I suspect most North...more
Jul 19, 2016Joanna rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Shelves: nonfiction, bookclub-blsa, audiobooks, 2016-read
This book could have been so much better. The book tells the history of class descriptions, particularly descriptions of poor whites by better off whites. Clearly, a great deal of research was involved and historical documents and quotes are presented. But the book somehow lacked heart. There were no personal stories, no voice given to the poor themselves, and very little analysis of what this all means today.
Also, while the title promises an 'untold history,' the information in this book didn't
...more
Feb 18, 2017Andy rated it did not like it · review of another edition
This is another book that's supposed to explain Trumpism. I'm sorry but I think the emperor is naked. This is not so much history as media criticism by someone who sat indoors watching Andy Griffith and Deliverance and dug up some show trivia. The concluding paragraph tells us: 'The very existence of such people--both in their visibility and invisibility--is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice.' What substance is there in th...more
WHITE TRASH VS. THE AMERICAN DREAM, Read the Book Club Babble Interview
A couple weeks ago, I bounced downstairs sporting my new Ralph Lauren t-shirt, emblazoned with the motto “Land of the Free” in red, white, and blue letters, of course! Three hours later, my review copy of Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America arrived and I began studying it right away. After reading a few chapters, the truth of Dr. Isenberg’s premise–that class structure is embedded in
...more
Definitely worth reading. Glad I stayed on that two month library waitlist!
Interesting, if overlong and repetitious, look at class in American society. A stronger editing hand would have strengthened this. (If I could give half stars, I probably would have rated this 3.5.)
Sep 17, 2017Vannessa Anderson rated it liked it
Because White Trash read like a textbook it was a laborious read and I found it a challenge to stay focus on the story. My take-away was how horrible white people with money and power can be to people who are not white and to women and children. I learned how horrible white people with money and power can be to white people without money and whom they consider beneath them. Then you have whites without money and power who cause harm to non-whites, women and children to feel they are above the gr...more
Oct 16, 2016Kathrina rated it really liked it
This book does what the best historical research can do -- shift our lens just enough to recognize the fallacies that have propped up what we take for granted as what it means to be American. Coupled with my recent reading of Between the World and Me, I can see that the American Dream has probably caused more damage to the majority of Americans than it has served. It is a thinly veneered myth that protects our belief in exceptionalism while maintaining social control over all groups that struggl...more
May 14, 2016Biblio Files (takingadayoff) rated it really liked it
Trash
Massive social history of class in America, starting with the European settlers up to the present day. Despite the provocative title, it's not just about white people -- after all, the fact that there's a phrase that specifies color means the default must be not white, rather a disturbing thought. And it isn't so much about what life was like for poor people, it's about attitudes of the middle class and upper class toward working class and poor people. Again, the title says a lot about that.
My i
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Jul 07, 2016C. Quabela rated it it was amazing
I’m giving this book a full rating for three reasons: 1) I haven’t read a history book in at least over a decade and so I am naïve concerning the conventions that may or may not have been well executed; 2) The book is very well written, researched/documented, and accessible to a person not familiar with the genre and/or topic; and 3) Yes, this book IS biased. It has an agenda. But from my background there is no such thing as objective reporting. Be it history, journalism, literature, what have y...more
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Nancy Isenberg is the author of New York Times bestseller White Trash, and Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the LA 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 LSU, and writes regularly for S...more
“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.” — 36 likes
“How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?” — 20 likes

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