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Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness Matt Wray. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2006.
Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865 Frank Byrne. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
These two books raise the fig leaf of human drives and examine what makes human nature what it is -generally condescending and unpleasant. Wray's concern is with why people seemingly must have some group or individuals over which they feel superior. In America, his field of concentration, from the colonization on in literature and social attitudes, the South has been considered ignorant, backward, incestuous, and stupid, despite the feeling that at least linguistically they were our contemporary ancestors. Often deprived of any satisfactory means of support or familial happiness, often Southerners have had a difficult...