Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, studying with Gerda Lerner. Her first book, SEX AND CITIZENSHIP IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), examines the origins of the women's rights movement. It was awarded the annual prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in 1999.

Her second book, FALLEN FOUNDER: The Life of Aaron Burr (Viking, 2007), undertook to correct the many biased accounts across two centuries that have too easily portrayed as a villain Thomas Jefferson's vice president and the victor in the duel that ended Alexander Hamilton's life. FALLEN FOUNDER received critical acclaim, was a Main Selection of the History Book Club, won the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award for nonfiction, and was a runner-up for the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.

Her third book, MADISON AND JEFFERSON (Random House, 2010), co-authored with Andrew Burstein, has also been widely praised, and was a New York Times bestseller among electronic books. It was named one of top five nonfiction titles of 2010 by Kirkus.

Professor Isenberg has been featured on C-SPAN2 "Book TV," and on various NPR programs over the years. She and Andrew Burstein are regular contributors to Salon.com, where they write history-accented pieces about modern political and cultural affairs.

Books by Nancy Isenberg

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg - History, Nonfiction

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over 400 years, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society --- where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics --- a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.