I became interested in figuring out the language: how do Americans talk about the poor? And then I realized that this is connected to the larger problem Americans have about class, that they believe a myth. He has this amazing line where, at the same moment that he’s calling for the education of the poor, something the Virginia legislature would reject, he refers to the poor as “rubbish.” I became very aware of the importance of how Jefferson talked about the poor.

But it also had to do with when I was working on “Madison and Jefferson,” which I coauthored with Andrew Burstein. Part of it has to do with my graduate training my first book dealt with race, class and gender. When you’re a historian, you gravitate toward certain issues. When did you first start working on the idea of the “poor white” or “poor white trash?”

It’s a bracing, sometimes upsetting read, beginning with its name, a term which still causes deep offense in some quarters. The book has been on Isenberg’s curriculum for 15 years, as part of a history class called “Crime, Conspiracy, and Courtroom Dramas,” which she teaches at Louisiana State University.įrom “Mockingbird,” Isenberg’s book travels back to the first English arrivals on the American shore, tracing four centuries of how we talk and think about class (and race) in our most unequal union. Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash” begins by looking at the characters in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Both the book and the movie play with the divide between Atticus Finch, who is saintly and proper, and the poor white family, the Ewells, whose daughter’s false rape accusation is at the story’s center, as an example that there are two kinds of white people in the South.

Nancy isenberg books