Isenberg, the T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University, has updated the paperback of White Trash to include updated reflections on the 2016 presidential election. As Isenberg and Rich will discuss, the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, from the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies.

Isenberg’s White Trash upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society — where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century, she argues; Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics, a widely popular movement that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and the Great Society. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the American identity. Welcoming remarks by Roosevelt House Director Harold Holzer. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, May 9, 2017.

AMERICAN SCHOOLS, COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES NEED TO TEACH THIS SUBJECT!

Today, Scotch-Irish is an Americanism almost unknown in England, Ireland or Scotland.[5] The term is somewhat unclear because some of the Scotch-Irish have little or no Scottish ancestry at all, as a large number of dissenter families had also been transplanted to Ulster from northern England.

…The usage Scots-Irish is a relatively recent version of the term. Two early citations include: 1) “a grave, elderly man of the race known in America as ” Scots-Irish” (1870);[13] and 2) “Dr. Cochran was of stately presence, of fair and florid complexion, features which testified his Scots-Irish descent” (1884)[14]
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_American