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Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

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Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  • Used
  • Hardcover
Condition
Used - Very Good
ISBN 10
1594202001
ISBN 13
9781594202001
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About This Item

Penguin Press HC, The. Used - Very Good. 2009. Hardcover. Cloth, dj. Minor shelf-wear. Very Good. (Subject: American History).

Synopsis

The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he lovedClarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King was named by John Hay "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—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a 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 King, only on his deathbed.Noted historian of the American West Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American "race," an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children. Passing Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the "Todds" wedding in 1888 to the 1964 death of Ada, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery, to finally the legacy inherited by Clarence King's granddaughter, who married a white man and adopted a white child in order to spare her family the legacies of racism.A remarkable feat of research and reporting spanning the Civil War to the civil rights era, Passing Strange tells a uniquely American story of self-invention, love, deception, and race.

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Details

Bookseller
Powell's Bookstores Chicago US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
SOL09076
Title
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
Author
Martha A. Sandweiss
Book Condition
Used - Very Good
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 10
1594202001
ISBN 13
9781594202001
Publisher
Penguin Press HC, The
Place of Publication
New York
This edition first published
2009-02

Terms of Sale

Powell's Bookstores Chicago

All orders subject to previous sale. Domestic Standard ships USPS Bound Printed Matter; Domestic Expedited ships UPS Ground; International ships via Air courier. All orders over $200.00 upgraded to UPS Ground without additional charge.

About the Seller

Powell's Bookstores Chicago

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2005
Chicago, Illinois

About Powell's Bookstores Chicago

Used, rare and out-of-print titles, specializing in academic and scholarly books. Independent bookstores in Chicago since 1970

Glossary

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Cloth
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