The New York Times Book Review - Thomas J. Sugrue
…Isenberg's story is [told]…with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a masterly manner. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to The Beverly Hillbillies, Isenberg…provides a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
Ms. Isenberg's project in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is to retell United States history in a manner that not only includes the weak, the powerless and the stigmatized, but also places them front and center. As such, she has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents…Viewed from below, a good angle for no one, America's history is usefully disorienting and nearly always appalling. White Trash will have you squirming in your chair…This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. It reminds us that, as Simon Schama wrote…"History's meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane." White Trash is indeed a bummer, and a thoroughly patriotic one. It deals in the truths that matter, which is to say, the uncomfortable ones.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
08/29/2016
Isenberg tackles a topic rarely addressed by mainstream American writing on race and class as she skillfully demonstrates that “class defines how real people live.” Isenberg highlights how social power brokers (including politicians, lawmakers, psychiatrists, and sociologists, writers of newspaper and literature) play a role in defining and reinforcing class in America. Actress Potter reads this complicated text with the solemnity and respect Isenberg’s prose deserves. In particular, Potter proves a master of emphasis, moving through each sentence and balancing the need to move forward with the need to vocally capture the sentence’s meaning. Her voice has a low but soft quality to it that makes it enjoyable to listen to, while her ability to strike meaning into each sentence keeps listeners engaged through this fascinating history. A Viking hardcover. (June)
Publishers Weekly
★ 04/25/2016
Isenberg (Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr), professor of history at Louisiana State University, tackles a topic rarely addressed by mainstream American writing on race and class as she skillfully demonstrates that “class defines how real people live.” Opening with a myth-busting origin story, Isenberg reveals the ways English class divisions were transplanted and embraced in the colonies at the expense of the lower classes. Colonization and expansion were accomplished because elites believed the poor were valuable only for the labor they provided for the nation. Isenberg then shows how words such as squatter, cracker, and white trash are rooted in public discussions over politics and land. Eugenics entered the conversation in an early 20th-century effort to breed out misfits and undesirables, and the Great Depression forced reevaluations of poverty and what it meant to be a “poor white” in the 1930s. In the book’s final section, a delectable mixture of political and popular culture, Isenberg analyzes the “white trash” makeover of the late 20th century thanks to movies such as Smokey and the Bandit, politicians Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s televangelism. A Marxist analysis of the lumpenproletariat this is not, but Isenberg’s expertise particularly shines in the examinations of early America, and every chapter is riveting. Illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (June)
Time
An important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress.”
New York Times
Formidable and truth-dealing.”
Entertainment Weekly
With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classism’s deep-seated roots.”
Washington Post
A gritty and sprawling assault on…American mythmaking.”
author of Holler if You Hear Me Michael Eric Dyson
This is breathtaking social history and dazzling cultural analysis at its best.
The Oprah Magazine O
This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”
From the Publisher
Formidable and truth-dealing…necessary.” – The New York Times
“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” –O Magazine
“A gritty and sprawling assault on…American mythmaking.” —Washington Post
“An eloquent synthesis of the country’s history of class stratification.” –The Boston Globe
“A bracing reminder of the persistent contempt for the white underclass.” –The Atlantic
“[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
“Isenberg . . . has written an important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress.” —TIME
“With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classism’s deep-seated roots.”–Entertainment Weekly
“Carefully researched…deeply relevant.” –Christian Science Monitor
Time
An important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress.”
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"This is breathtaking social history and dazzling cultural analysis at its best." Michael Eric Dyson, author of Holler if You Hear Me
Library Journal
05/15/2016
Isenberg (Fallen Founder) sets out to find the lower classes that, over time, have been variously cast as degraded, despoiled, and even demented. In doing so, the author argues that their presence and persistence counters the promise of American progress, for it suggests that class was, and is, more resilient than the American Dream would have it. Failing populist moments, the white "trash" remained disfranchised and dismissed, or feared for their supposed debilitating effects on morality. Isenberg takes the long view, from the convicts that the British transported to the colonies to segregationists, "trailer trash," the friendly yokelism and folk "wisdom" of The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show and now Duck Dynasty. The author largely identifies "white trash" as a Southern phenomenon (the urban poor are not part of the society surveyed) but provides an astonishingly wide and copious canvas by describing the ways "white trash" appeared or were seen as individuals of concern in popular culture, political rhetoric, scientific theories, pseudoscientific policies, and literature. The narrative incorporates people as varied as Lyndon B. Johnson, Harper Lee, and Tammy Faye Bakker to show that the exceptions to the supposed American exceptionalism were, and are, its fundamental fact and foil. VERDICT Essential reading for a new perspective on the role of class in American society.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
JULY 2016 - AudioFile
Because WHITE TRASH is ultimately an academic tome, its narration needs to be energetic enough to make it a successful audiobook. Kirsten Potter’s performance does not hold the listener’s attention. This history of poor, white Americans (though it includes other races) considers topics such as the rise to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who was born into poverty, and the sociological implications of “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” In Potter’s favor, her narration is rhythmic, filled with regularly emphasized syllables and brief pauses that signal a significant point ahead. Overall, though, her performance is not enough to make this complex work a compelling listen. G.S.D. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-04-13
A rigorously researched study of the entrenched system of racial classification that dispels many myths about American national identity.In this impressive work of social history, Isenberg (American History/Louisiana State Univ.; Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, 2007, etc.) challenges head-on America's "fable of class denial." From the first indentured servants brought to Plymouth and Jamestown to the caricatured hillbillies of Duck Dynasty, the existence of "waste" people, or impoverished, ignorant, landless whites, has persistently run against convenient notions of the upstanding American founder—i.e., moral, hardworking "entrepreneurial stewards of the exploitable land." Dumped on the Colonies, the vagrant, often criminal poor from England and elsewhere were considered expendable and often exploited. As a key to the story, Isenberg looks at the early settlement of North Carolina, which became a "renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless," situated between elite Virginians and slaveholding "upstart" South Carolinians. Contrary to the mythmaking of the exceptional early American in writings by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, based on theories of "good breeding" and yeomanry, a whole class of common people grew up as a byproduct of the slaveholding states, living on the margins of the plantations: dirt-poor Southerners (literally "clay-eaters") who were considered lazy and racially degenerate. Moreover, the enormous new swaths of Western land were largely populated by a new class of "squatters" or "crackers," considered "mangy varmints infesting the land" and represented by the first Westerner elected president, Andrew Jackson. Isenberg examines some surprising sources of these early stereotypes of white trash, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which the author "described poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance." From the eugenics movement to the rise of the proud redneck, Isenberg portrays a very real and significant history of class privilege in the United States. A riveting thesis supported by staggering research.