Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition-the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.

We think of the United States as a nation committed, at least on paper, to ideals of human equality, under God and/or under the law. But as robust as the notion of the "American dream" is a longstanding defense of social hierarchies, including vast gulfs between rich and poor.

Drawing on forgotten characters and neglected archives, Kim Phillips-Fein...