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

Authors: Sandweiss, Martha A.
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
BISAC/Subject: HIS036040, BIO015000, SOC031000
ISBN: 9781440686153, Related ISBNs: 014311686X, 1440686157, 1594202001, 9780143116868, 9781440686153
Classification: Non-Fiction
Number of pages: 384,
Audience: General/trade
Synopsis: 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.
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