Nancy Isenberg

Another useful corrective to the "American Dream" myth, surveying American history from the earliest colonial era to show how the attitudes and beliefs of the political class towards "waste people", "lubbers", "squatters", "rubbish", "mudsills", "crackers", "hillbillies", and "rednecks", among other unflattering terms applied to poor whites, have shaped an economic structure in which a fixed white underclass has been trapped. Pays fairly little attention to that class itself, focusing instead on what the powerful have done to it, until the latter couple of chapters in which the author gives a cursory and rather unsatisfying look at the rise of what might be called white trash culture in the last few decades. Her historical economics > her pop culture sociology.… (más)