White Trash by Nancy Isenberg

One more title to add to my never ending effort to understand how in the world the 2016 election happened.  This one is subtitled "The 400-year Untold History of Class in America".  This is not the history I studied - ever.  Clearly the publishers of my history text books stuck to identifying the "winners" and playing to America the Beautiful.  To quote the author, "If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders' ingenious plan or the Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states' rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions."  I those 400 years there were so many voices that spoke up for change, urging people to pay attention to an unpleasant reality instead of a comforting myth - voices that never made it into the history books.  England used its colonies to empty its poor - even America.  We used Eugenics, Manifest Destiny and Social Darwinism to keep the classes alive.  We have to admit to the problem before we can fix it.  Now what?