Top 40 Nancy Isenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.”

— Nancy Isenberg

2. “Poor whites are still taught to hate – but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” We.”

— Nancy Isenberg

3. “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.”

— Nancy Isenberg

4. “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.”

— Nancy Isenberg

5. “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.”

— Nancy Isenberg

6. “Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.”

— Nancy Isenberg

7. “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.”

— Nancy Isenberg

8. “Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.”

— Nancy Isenberg

9. “In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America” was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.”

— 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. “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

12. “We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream.”

— Nancy Isenberg

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

— Nancy Isenberg

14. “Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft.”

— Nancy Isenberg

15. “To modern conservatives, women are first and foremost breeders.”

— Nancy Isenberg

16. “If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.”

— Nancy Isenberg

17. “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

18. “The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an “American People” do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.”

— Nancy Isenberg

19. “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

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. “History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read – books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study – all of which reflect a world view not ours.”

— Nancy Isenberg

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle.”

— Nancy Isenberg

27. “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

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

— Nancy Isenberg

29. “An astute observer wrote in 1924 that American voters preferred to “cherish the unrealities they have absorbed” based upon “the primal instinct to defeat the side they hate or fear.”

— Nancy Isenberg

30. “Unlike Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market, Wilson’s dark hand represented the dangers of an unregulated economy: downward mobility and the ruin of countless lives.26.”

— Nancy Isenberg

31. “Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.”

— Nancy Isenberg

32. “It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.”

— Nancy Isenberg

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

— Nancy Isenberg

34. “The main thrust of Burr’s argument was that citizenship came from consent. Drawing on his favorite writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burr defended the basic premise of the social contract: citizens were not born, but made, through their participation in civil society. Gallatin.”

— Nancy Isenberg

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

— Nancy Isenberg

36. “When eugenicists thought of degenerates, they automatically focused on the South. To make his point, Davenport said outright that if a federal policy regulating immigration was not put in place, New York would turn into Mississippi.”

— Nancy Isenberg

37. “We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game.”

— Nancy Isenberg

38. “Many people – -women especially – -remain trapped in the poverty into which they were born. The successful person from this background is the exception. The American dream is a double-edged sword in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard-pressed not to condemn those who get struck between the cracks.”

— Nancy Isenberg

39. “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

40. “Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him.”

— Nancy Isenberg

41. “We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side, and that four border states never seceded.”

— Nancy Isenberg