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, history professor Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. They were alternately known as 'waste people,' 'offals,' 'rubbish,' 'lazy lubbers,' and 'crackers.' By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called 'clay eaters' and 'sandhillers,' known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. Redneck roots : Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye Outing rednecks : slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin America's strange breed : the long legacy of white trash.

Pedigree and poor white trash : bad blood, half-breeds and clay-eaters Cowards, poltroons, and mudsills : Civil war as class warfare Thoroughbreds and scalawags : bloodlines and bastard stock in the age of eugenics Forgotten men and poor folk : downward mobility and the Great Depression The cult of the country boy : Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ's Great Society Part II: Degeneration of the American breed.

Taking out the trash : waste people in the New World John Locke's Lubberland : the settlements of Carolina and Georgia Benjamin Franklin's American breed : the demographics of mediocrity Thomas Jefferson's rubbish : a curious topography of class Andrew Jackson's cracker country : the squatter as common man Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.

White trash the 400 year untold history