Nancy Isenberg Quotes

#1. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Nancy Isenberg

#2. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of "loser" people on the larger economy.

Nancy Isenberg

#3. Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized.70

Nancy Isenberg

#4. This was how he came to trust in the power of emulation; he believed that people could be conditioned to do the right thing by observing good leaders.

Nancy Isenberg

#5. The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an "American People" do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.

Nancy Isenberg

#6. For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.

Nancy Isenberg

#7. More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.

Nancy Isenberg

#8. By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants.

Nancy Isenberg

#9. What separates history from myth is that history takes in the whole picture, whereas myth averts our eyes from the truth when it turns men into heroes and gods.

Nancy Isenberg

#10. 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

Nancy Isenberg

#11. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The

Nancy Isenberg

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

Nancy Isenberg

#13. When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win.

Nancy Isenberg

#14. The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

Nancy Isenberg

#15. Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

Nancy Isenberg

#16. This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order.

Nancy Isenberg

#17. 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.

Nancy Isenberg

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

Nancy Isenberg

#19. How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

Nancy Isenberg

#20. For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never "wash out the stain of servility." There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.

Nancy Isenberg

#21. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft.

Nancy Isenberg