Introduction: White trash as social difference : groups, boundaries, and inequalities -- Lubbers, crackers, and poor white trash : borders and boundaries in the colonies and the early republic -- Imagining poor whites in the antebellum South : abolitionist and pro-slavery fictions -- "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" : American eugenics and poor white trash -- "The disease of laziness" : crackers, poor whites, and hookworm crusaders in the new South -- Limning the boundaries of whiteness
Summary
White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources--literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses--to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. -- From publisher description
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-210) and index
Notes
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
In English
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