[Hac-announce] June 2017 Book Discussion: "White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History of Class in America" by Nancy Isenberg

[kvngough at aol.com]

Our book for June is White Trash: The 400-Year Old Untold History of Class in America by historian Nancy Isenberg. The discussion will take place Saturday, May 20, 2017 at 2 pm in the library of the Unitarian Society of New Haven at 700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden.

>From Amazon:
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. 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–-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’s Great Society; they 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.

“[White Trash] sheds bright light on a long history of demagogic national politicking, beginning with Jackson. It makes Donald Trump seem far less unprecedented than today’s pundits proclaim.” – Slate

Lite snacks will be served.



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