45 Quotes by Nancy Isenberg

Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance.

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? Twenty-first-century Americans need to confront this enduring conundrum. Let us recognize the existence of our underclass.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises – the dream of upward mobility – and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The.

British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World. After.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

In 1790, “squatter” appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper, but written as “squatlers,” describing men who inhabited the western borderlands of that state, along the Susquehanna River. They were men who “sit down on river bottoms,” pretend to have titles, and chase off anyone who dares to usurp their claims.5.

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But today’s trailer trash are merely yesterday’s vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.

Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government.” For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.