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

New York: The Penguin Press, 2009. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [12], 370, [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Minor sticker residue on back of DJ. This ground-breaking 'family history' traces the secret double life of a nineteenth-century scientist and surveyor of the post-Civil War American West, revealing the mixed heritage that enabled him to cross color lines and conduct a second existence as a black Pullman porter and steelworker with an African-American wife and five multi-racial children. Martha Ann Sandweiss (born March 29, 1954) is an American historian, with particular interests in the history of the American West, visual culture, and public history. She is a professor of History at Princeton University, and the author of several books. Sandweiss is the Founder and Project Director of the Princeton & Slavery Project, a large-scale investigation into Princeton University's historical ties to the institution of slavery. The Princeton & Slavery Project began with an undergraduate research seminar Sandweiss taught in spring 2013, and has since grown to comprise a website and public programming events in Princeton, New Jersey.[4] The Project website launched on November 6, 2017, and currently includes more than 90 scholarly essays, a digital archive of hundreds of historical sources, video interviews with Princeton University alumni, and other multimedia tools and features. A scholarly symposium presenting Project findings was held in November 2017, beginning with a keynote speech by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and including panels discussing the Project's research and its implications for the study of slavery in the United States. Clarence Rivers King (January 6, 1842 - December 24, 1901) was an American geologist, mountaineer, and author. King grew up in the North and his grandmother, Sophia Little, influenced his views on slavery. She would not eat fruits and other Southern grown products because they were grown with slave labor. Because of this, King was against slavery and African American injustice. He was the first director of the United States Geological Survey from 1879 to 1881. Nominated by Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes, King was noted for his exploration of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Over a period of six years, King and his team explored areas from eastern California to Wyoming. During that time he also published his famous Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872). While King was finishing the 40th Parallel Survey, the western U.S. was abuzz with news of a secret diamond deposit. King and some of his crew tracked down the secret location in northwest Colorado and exposed it as a fraud, now known as the Diamond hoax of 1872. He became an international celebrity through exposing the hoax. Derived from a Kirkus review: One of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divide—in reverse. Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian Sandweiss, he went through life "tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world." When King returned from his globetrotting expeditions and settled down in New York to enjoy his fame as the bestselling author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, he embarked on a romance with an African-American woman named Ada Copeland. A young nursemaid who moved north from Georgia in the mid-1880s, she apparently met King sometime in 1887 or early 1888 while he was out "slumming." That word, the author explains, denoted a class-crossing "fashionable amusement," according to the Saturday Evening Post. King was serious about his courtship of Copeland, but it was fraught with peril for all concerned, presenting threatening possibilities for blackmail on the one hand and abandonment on the other. He decided to present himself to her as a Pullman porter named James Todd, an invented identity that "hinged not just on one lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions." As Sandweiss notes in this sturdy work, which blends elements of social and intellectual history with biography, thousands of light-skinned blacks in that era tried to pass for white, but the number of those who did the opposite must have been tiny. Yet King married Copeland and gave up his cherished social privileges. She had borne him five children, and he was on his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told her the truth. An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faith—and also, as Sandweiss observes, "love and longing that transcends the historical bounds of time and place.".