Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality (Wadsworth, 2002) Newby, I. A. Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880–1915 (1989). concentrates on the poorest whites Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Plain Folk of the Old South (1949), the classic study Thernstrom, Stephan. Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964) Social class in the United States