Passing Strange
A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
By Martha A. Sandweiss
(Penguin (Non-Classics), Paperback, 9780143116868, 384pp.)
Publication Date: January 26, 2010
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Compact Disc, Compact Disc, MP3 CD, Hardcover
Categories: Cultural Heritage, Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - Histor
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Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog
The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as "the best and brightest of his generation." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. In Passing Strange, noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.
Martha A. Sandweiss is Professor of History at Princeton University. She began her career as a museum curator and taught for twenty years at Amherst College. She is the author of numerous works on western American history and the history of photography, including Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray Allen Billington Award, and Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace, and is the co-editor of the Oxford History of the American West.
Clarence King was a geologist, a best-selling author -- and a liar. He lived an elaborate double life, and his story -- told by Martha Sandweiss in her book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line -- sheds light on our complicated ideas about race. More at NPR.org
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