Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia by Elizabeth Catte

Many know the author, Elizabeth Catte, from her first book, What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia. This book, too, is a plain-spoken and direct polemic. The point is that eugenics and the involuntary sterilization of 8,000 people in Virginia between the years 1927 and 1979 is a manifestation of America’s racist and classist heritage and contemporary crisis. Elizabeth Catte is from Knoxville, but has lived, since 1917, in Staunton, Virginia, where the site of much sterilization, Western State, now serves as an upscale hotel with condominiums. "In a lacerating analysis of the links between economic policies and eugenicist thought, . . .this provocative and impeccably argued history reveals how traumas of the past inform the inequalities of today." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review. "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 tho