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. Pedigree and poor white trash: bad blood, half-breeds and clay-eaters 7. 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. White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America. 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.
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