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Historian Nancy Isenberg’s critically acclaimed and bestselling White Trash has been called a “groundbreaking and landmark book” upending the comforting myths about America as the land of equal opportunity and social mobility.

With White Trash Isenberg puts class under the kind of lens that writers like Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates put race, and gives a historical context to writings on contemporary inequality. Opening with a myth-busting origin story, Isenberg reveals how the English class divisions were embraced in the settling of America and how colonization and expansion were accomplished because the upper class believed the poor were only valuable for the labor they provided.

Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography and won the Oklahoma Book Award for best book in Nonfiction. She is the coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson. She is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at LSU, and writes regularly for Salon.com. Isenberg is the winner of the 2016 Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list.