I was a senior in high school when I realized I was a peasant. We were required to write a detailed family narrative for our Advanced Placement history class, and I was appalled: my grandfather, a Birmingham factory worker, had spoken in a lower-class accent and contemplated running away to Australia to make his life better because his grandfather was a highwayman who drank too much and fired his blunderbuss up the chimneys of respectable drawing rooms and laughed when the soot covered the clean houses.

And that was only one side of the family.