"Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was a manifestation of white supremacy, a means of controlling "troublesome" women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land."-- Page 4 of cover.