I know I said I was going to use this space more for thinking out loud about my thesis work, so I suppose I better do that. I’ll come next week with a look at my thesis proposal, once I present it Wednesday. But for now, here’s some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation.

I just finished Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America this week. If you, like me, are interested in how we got to the moment we are in politically and socially, then I can’t recommend Isenberg’s walk through the history of the lowest class of whites in this country, referred to alternately as “white trash”, “rednecks”, “trailer trash” or a whole other host of terms she recounts.

In terms of the work I’m doing, it really was helpful to get a sense of the lay of the land when it comes to poor white communities, and how they have been perceived across time. The feelings of alienation and dislocation arose from a historical reality, and this book helped me track that. While the communities I’ll be focusing on in my work aren’t necessarily the poorest of the poor, they are in many ways akin to the people detailed in this book.

(Also, if you are a Hamilton junkie like me, Isenberg wrote the definitive biography of Aaron Burr. I read it about a decade ago and it still sticks with me. Can’t recommend it enough.)

I also read the entirety of The View From Flyover Country, a book of essays by journalist Sarah Kendzior. Drawn from her work at Al Jazeera, the essays, while not necessarily useful for my thesis, were enlightening and infuriating all at once. The essays were written between 2013 and 2015, and provide a snapshot of the ways working class people were, and continue to be, left behind. I do recommend it.

My current reading list is The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones, and White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity, by James W. Perkinson. I’m especially excited about the potential of the latter. I’ll update my thoughts on these once I get further in.