Month: July 2019

by Howard Zinn

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

(from the cover)

The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

“The wretched and landless poor have been a part of American culture from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. In her ground-breaking history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg explodes our comforting myths about equality in the land of opportunity, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present poor white trash.

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. Some of the founding fathers believed poor people were subhuman, and wanted to apply strategies used in agriculture and animal husbandry to improve the stock. Poor whites were central to the rise of Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in addition to slavery, the Civil War itself was fought over class issues. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which was a factor in the rise of eugenics — a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. Those poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society. Now they are offered to us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been near the center of major debates over the character of the American identity.

The contemporary focus on the “one percent” has animated public discussion about power dynamics, but without context. We have been taught to overlook the fact that privilege runs deep in our history. Without pause, America has been ignoring, if not hating, its underclass since the seventeenth century. Today we acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring nature of class as well.”

(From the flap of the book)

The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

“White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain’s American colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 people became slaves there in all but name. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.

Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule.

The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.

This saga of exploitation and cruelty, which spanned 170 years, has been submerged by the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.”

(From the back cover of the book)