Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia

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Product Details
Price
$26.00  $24.18
Publisher
Belt Publishing
Publish Date
Pages
176
Dimensions
5.0 X 7.4 X 1.0 inches | 0.7 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781948742733

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About the Author
Elizabeth Catte is a historian and writer living in Virginia, and the author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (Belt, 2018). She is an editor-at-large for West Virginia University Press and the co-founder of Passel, an applied history and consulting company. She lives in Staunton, Virginia.
Reviews
"In a lacerating analysis of the links between economic policies and eugenicist thought, Catte examines coerced labor at Virginia's psychiatric institutions, the destruction of a historically-Black neighborhood in Charlottesville under the guise of urban renewal, and the transformation of Western State into an upscale hotel and condominiums. This provocative and impeccably argued history reveals how traumas of the past inform the inequalities of today." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"In this grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing account, Catte examines the period from the late 1920s to 1979 at the Western State Lunatic Asylum....A well-told, richly contextualized investigation of an appalling episode in American history."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Catte did not come to play. This is historical research at its most compelling and its most accessible. Fully academic yet fully human, Catte makes the historical personal, blending the past with her lived experiences in the present. Catte's first book, What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, proved she could be the voice for a story in desperate need of a better narrator, and in Pure America, she has done it again."--Sara Beth West
"Pure America exposes Virginia's shameful past, but it also highlights how much the present continues to be stamped in its image. ...Catte's dive into the houses eugenics built demonstrates just how thoroughly and pitilessly a certain kind of capital-backed white knowing shapes the country's built environment to this day."--Ellen Wayland-Smith, Boston Review
A Tom Beer pick of "Small Books That Shine a Big Light"--Kirkus
"Masterfully written."--Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
"Persuasive and compelling."--A National Book Review "5 Hot Books" pick
"Riveting [...] Slim but capacious."--Wall Street Journal
"Catte weaves a haunting but necessary story of how eugenics shaped and continues to shape her community, as well as how eager some in the community are to move on and forget."--Chris Hammer, Christian Century