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

by Sandweiss, Martha A.

• ISBN13: 9780143116868
• ISBN10: 014311686X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-26
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Martha A. Sandweiss is a professor of history at Princeton University. The author of numerous works on western American history and the history of photography, she lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Prologue: An Invented Life	p. 1
Clarence King and Ada Copeland
Becoming Clarence King	p. 13
King of the West	p. 47
Becoming Ada Copeland	p. 71
King of the City	p. 97
James and Ada Todd
New Beginnings	p. 131
Family Lives	p. 158
Breakdowns	p. 185
Endings	p. 212
Ada King
On Her Own	p. 247
The Trial	p. 277
Epilogue: Secrets	p. 302
Acknowledgments	p. 307
Notes	p. 313
Index	p. 359
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.