Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line Contributor(s): Sandweiss, Martha A. (Author) |
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ISBN: 014311686X ISBN-13: 9780143116868 Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group OUR PRICE: $16.20 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2010 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional - General - Social Science | Minority Studies - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - African American Studies |
Dewey: B |
LCCN: 2008034886 |
Physical Information: 0.82" H x 5.36" W x 8.4" (0.72 lbs) 400 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 1851-1899 - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Topical - Black History |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |