The Long History of American Inequality
Engineered to Divide: How the Ruling Class Hides the Wealth Gap America at 250: The Hierarchy Was Always the Point America's founding document promises equality. America's founding economy delivered something else entirely. The hierarchy preceded the republic. The bottom of it had an assigned occupant before the Constitution ever dried. Wasted People, Manufactured Fears: The Long History of American Inequality Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America dismantles the myth of a class-free society and this is one of those books that genuinely changes how you read the present. Her story begins in colonial America, where surplus poor people were shipped by the British Empire to form what Richard Hakluyt envisioned as "one giant workhouse." England exported its poverty across the Atlantic. The wretched and landless poor existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement, known alternately as ...