Martha A. Sandweiss is Professor of History at Princeton University. She began her career as a museum curator and taught for twenty years at Amherst College. She is the author of numerous works on western American history and the history of photography, including "Print the Legend: Photography and the American West," winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray Allen Billington Award, and "Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace," and is the co-editor of the "Oxford History of the American West."
?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 (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen:
Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), 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 a
aIf you drop the name Clarence King to almost any group of
Americans today, it is unlikely they will have heard of him. This
was not always so. During the final decades of the 19th century,
King strode across the national scene as the scion of a prominent
family and a Yale-trained geologist who mapped the American West.
When he published a collection of vivid essays about his exploits,
""Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,"" the book was an instant
hit. King gained further fame when he exposed a fraudulent scheme
to sell interests in diamond fields whose purported value was
greater than all the silver and gold in Nevada's celebrated
Comstock Lode. By proving that the fields had been artificially
"salted" with precious gems, he halted investments in the project,
forestalling the economic bubble that would certainly have formed
around it. For this he was nicknamed the King of Diamonds. "We have
escaped, thanks to God and Clarence King, a great financial
calamity," one newspaper editorial said.
King often inspired such talk. He was a close friend of the writer
Henry Adams and the diplomat John Hay, both of whom thought him the
most talented man of their generation. Although he was born in
Newport, R.I., to an old and distinguished family -- a paternal
ancestor came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and his
mother could trace her ancestry back to signers of the Magna Carta
-- King had little money for most of his life. Instead, he cobbled
together income from government appointments, writing projects and
loans from rich friends to support himself as a gentleman
scientist.
But there "was" another side to King that neither the public nor
his glittering friends knew, a sidethat Martha A. Sandweiss
explores with great sensitivity, insight and painstaking research
in "Passing Strange." The title of this immensely fascinating work
provides a broad hint: King lived a racial double life. It would be
hard to imagine a man more "white," meaning a man who was more
thoroughly steeped in the privileges available only to whites of
his class during the Gilded Age. But he was also secretly married
to Ada Copeland, a black woman who had been born a slave in
Georgia. Even more astounding, she knew nothing of his life as
Clarence King. Indeed, she did not even know that he was Clarence
King. From the day they met in Manhattan in 1887 or 1888 until
1901, when King died, she knew him as "James Todd." When they
married in 1888, she became Ada Todd. And when their five children
were born over the next 13 years, their last name was Todd,
too.
""Passing strange"" -- Sandweiss's play-on-words meaning both
exceptionally odd and passing for black -- captures the situation
precisely. King invented an ingenious identity, posing as a
light-skinned Pullman porter. Why a porter? First, it was well
known that Pullman hired only black men as porters and waiters on
the company's trains. So his wife and neighbors assumed that if the
fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, blond- haired James Todd worked as a
Pullman porter, he must be black. Second, the job provided an
explanation for his frequent absences from home. And finally,
stable employment was a way to attract young Ada. Clarence was 18
years older than she. He knew that she, like other black refugees
from the South, was struggling. A Pullman porter would be able to
provide a decent life for her and any children they might have --
andover the years, that is what he did.
""Passing Strange"" is ultimately a book about a couple, and
Sandweiss has used her formidable skills as a researcher to
reconstruct as much of their lives as possible. This was
necessarily an uneven task. Much more is known about Clarence King
than about Ada Copeland. Sandweiss succeeds admirably, however, in
piecing together a portrait of a young woman who achieved stability
in a domestic setup that would seem unendurable in today's world.
One must remember the times and what Ada escaped when she came
north and met her James Todd, under circumstances that remain
mysterious. Perhaps the most powerful feature of this book is the
way Sandweiss evokes the terrifying racial landscape of the late
19th and early 20th centuries. The Georgia of Ada's childhood was,
quite simply, a deadly place for blacks. Terrorism was the order of
the day; whites killed blacks almost at will. When schools were set
up to teach black children to read, white townspeople occasionally
burned them down. After enduring such a place, living with a
somewhat wayward husband, who nevertheless loved her and provided
for her, would seem rather easy.
Raised by an abolitionist mother and grandmother, King romanticized
blacks and believed, Sandweiss says, that racial mixing would
"improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctively
American people." But his society friends lived by the racial order
of the day. Although Adams and Hay were not the kind of men to burn
down schools for black children, they might have cut their dear
friend out of their lives had he been open about his relationship
with a black woman. Instead, King strained mightily to hold on to
the twoworlds that he loved, terrified to lose either one.
This story does not have a happy ending. King died penniless, wiped
out by disastrous investments and poor career moves. There followed
a long and very public court battle over a mysterious trust fund
that he had supposedly left for Ada and their children. But King's
talent for friendship stood him in good stead. His friends bought a
house for Ada and provided the family with a monthly stipend, all
anonymously; racial decorum had to be maintained. And, as Sandweiss
notes, King's early biographers played along by pretty much writing
Ada Todd out of her husband's life and treating their relationship
as a distasteful lapse on his part. It was, of course, more than
that. It was a tragedy, because all King wanted was to marry the
woman he loved while maintaining the respect and amity of his white
family and friends. That was too much to ask of his time. A-
a Annette Gord on-Reed is the author of ""The Hemingses of
Monticello,""
aOne of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divideain
reverse.
Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King
enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian
Sandweiss (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen:
Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), he went through
life atempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of
losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the
world.a 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
aslumming.a That word, the author explains, denoted a
class-crossing afashionable amusement, a 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 ahinged not just on one
lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions.a 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 hewas on his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told
her the truth.
An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faithaand
also, as Sandweiss observes, alove and longing that transcends the
historical bounds of time and place.aa
a"Kirkus Reviews"
aSandweiss ("Print the Legend") serves a delicious brew of public
accomplishment and domestic intrigue in this dual biography of the
geologist-explorer Clarence King (1842-1901) and Ada Copeland (c.
1861-1964), a ablack, working-class womana who was aborn a slave.a
Rendered as fiction, this true tale, would seem quite
implausible-aa model son of Newport and one of the most admired
scientists in America, a Clarence kept secret for 13 years his
marriage to Ada and their apparently contented domestic life. He
kept his patrician past and celebrated present concealed as well
from his wife, who believed herself the wife of James Todd, a black
Pullman porter. Sandweiss provides a fascinating account of King's
aextraordinary double life as an eminent white scientist and a
black workingmana; Ada's struggle athrough the legal system to
assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial
history, and [unsuccessfully] claim the trust fund she believed to
be hersa; and rich insights into the adistinctive American ideas
about racea that allowed King to apass the other way across the
color line, claiming African ancestry when he had none at all.a A
remarkable feat of research and reporting that covers the long
century from Civil War to Civil Rights, "Passing Strange" tells a
uniquely American story of self- invention, love, deception and
race.a
a"Publishers Weekly" (starred review Feb.)
a"Passing Strange" tells anastounding true story that would beggar
most novelistsa imaginationsa] A fine, mesmerizing account.a
aJanet Maslin, "The New York Times"
a[Sandweiss is] a curious, talented writera] she tells [Clarence
Kingas story] with a scholaras rigor and a storytelleras vervea] A
sophisticated work of scholarship.a
a"Columbia Journalism Review"
aElaborate and incrediblea] Remarkable.a
a"Bookpage"
aSandweiss serves a delicious brew of public accomplishment and
domestic intriguea] Fascinating.a
a"Publishers Weekly, starred review"
aOne of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divideain
reverse. 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. An intriguing look at long-held secrets.a
a"Kirkus Reviews"
aAlthough "Passing Strange" reads like a suspenseful novel, it
introduces us to a real American hero who lived a fascinating life
on both sides of the color line. Sandweiss gives us a great lesson
in American history that spans three generations.a aLawrence Otis
Graham, author of "Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper
Class"
a"Passing Strange" combines remarkable detective work, riveting
storytelling, and the enduring question of race to fashion a most
unusual but very American family saga about a famous white man and
a heretofore unknown black woman. This book is a stunning
achievement and example of just how deeply race is woven into our
history, our imaginations, and our lives. Ada Copeland, who became
a Todd, and then a King, rescued from obscurity by a talented
historian, steals the show.a
aDavid W. Blight, Yale University, and author of "A Slave No More:
Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of
Emancipation"
a"Passing Strange" is a masterful work of scholarship, and a deeply
moving human story well told. Here is a riveting new narrative
about a hidden history of American race relations, one filled with
love, deception and utmost tragedy on both sides of the color
line.a
aNeil Henry, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of
California at Berkeley, author of "Pearl's Secret"
a"Passing Strange" is an irresistible story of love and deception
beautifully told. But it is also a major contribution to our
understanding of race, class, and gender. This biography of a
secret interracial marriage also tells more about the social
experience of big city lifeaNew York in this caseathan a shelf full
of urban histories.a
aThomas Bender, New York University, author of "The Unfinished
City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea"
aThis is a wonderfully intelligent and haunting book about love and
race and secrets and revelations. The secrets were personal, and
closely guarded. In showing how and why they remained secret, Marni
Sandweiss reveals much about the American past and the American
present.a
aRichard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History,
Stanford University, author of "The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires
and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815"
?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 (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen:
Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), 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 a
aIf you drop the name Clarence King to almost any group of
Americans today, it is unlikely they will have heard of him. This
was not always so. During the final decades of the 19th century,
King strode across the national scene as the scion of a prominent
family and a Yale-trained geologist who mapped the American West.
When he published a collection of vivid essays about his exploits,
""Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,"" the book was an instant
hit. King gained further fame when he exposed a fraudulent scheme
to sell interests in diamond fields whose purported value was
greater than all the silver and gold in Nevada's celebrated
Comstock Lode. By proving that the fields had been artificially
"salted" with precious gems, he halted investments in the project,
forestalling the economic bubble that would certainly have formed
around it. For this he was nicknamed the King of Diamonds. "We have
escaped, thanks to God and Clarence King, a great financial
calamity," one newspaper editorial said.
King often inspired such talk. He was a close friend of the writer
Henry Adams and the diplomat John Hay, both of whom thought him the
most talented man of their generation. Although he was born in
Newport, R.I., to an old and distinguished family -- a paternal
ancestor came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and his
mother could trace her ancestry back to signers of the Magna Carta
-- King had little money for most of his life. Instead, he cobbled
together income from government appointments, writing projects and
loans from rich friends to support himself as a gentleman
scientist.
But there "was" another side to King that neither the public nor
his glittering friends knew, a sidethat Martha A. Sandweiss
explores with great sensitivity, insight and painstaking research
in "Passing Strange." The title of this immensely fascinating work
provides a broad hint: King lived a racial double life. It would be
hard to imagine a man more "white," meaning a man who was more
thoroughly steeped in the privileges available only to whites of
his class during the Gilded Age. But he was also secretly married
to Ada Copeland, a black woman who had been born a slave in
Georgia. Even more astounding, she knew nothing of his life as
Clarence King. Indeed, she did not even know that he was Clarence
King. From the day they met in Manhattan in 1887 or 1888 until
1901, when King died, she knew him as "James Todd." When they
married in 1888, she became Ada Todd. And when their five children
were born over the next 13 years, their last name was Todd,
too.
""Passing strange"" -- Sandweiss's play-on-words meaning both
exceptionally odd and passing for black -- captures the situation
precisely. King invented an ingenious identity, posing as a
light-skinned Pullman porter. Why a porter? First, it was well
known that Pullman hired only black men as porters and waiters on
the company's trains. So his wife and neighbors assumed that if the
fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, blond- haired James Todd worked as a
Pullman porter, he must be black. Second, the job provided an
explanation for his frequent absences from home. And finally,
stable employment was a way to attract young Ada. Clarence was 18
years older than she. He knew that she, like other black refugees
from the South, was struggling. A Pullman porter would be able to
provide a decent life for her and any children they might have --
andover the years, that is what he did.
""Passing Strange"" is ultimately a book about a couple, and
Sandweiss has used her formidable skills as a researcher to
reconstruct as much of their lives as possible. This was
necessarily an uneven task. Much more is known about Clarence King
than about Ada Copeland. Sandweiss succeeds admirably, however, in
piecing together a portrait of a young woman who achieved stability
in a domestic setup that would seem unendurable in today's world.
One must remember the times and what Ada escaped when she came
north and met her James Todd, under circumstances that remain
mysterious. Perhaps the most powerful feature of this book is the
way Sandweiss evokes the terrifying racial landscape of the late
19th and early 20th centuries. The Georgia of Ada's childhood was,
quite simply, a deadly place for blacks. Terrorism was the order of
the day; whites killed blacks almost at will. When schools were set
up to teach black children to read, white townspeople occasionally
burned them down. After enduring such a place, living with a
somewhat wayward husband, who nevertheless loved her and provided
for her, would seem rather easy.
Raised by an abolitionist mother and grandmother, King romanticized
blacks and believed, Sandweiss says, that racial mixing would
"improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctively
American people." But his society friends lived by the racial order
of the day. Although Adams and Hay were not the kind of men to burn
down schools for black children, they might have cut their dear
friend out of their lives had he been open about his relationship
with a black woman. Instead, King strained mightily to hold on to
the twoworlds that he loved, terrified to lose either one.
This story does not have a happy ending. King died penniless, wiped
out by disastrous investments and poor career moves. There followed
a long and very public court battle over a mysterious trust fund
that he had supposedly left for Ada and their children. But King's
talent for friendship stood him in good stead. His friends bought a
house for Ada and provided the family with a monthly stipend, all
anonymously; racial decorum had to be maintained. And, as Sandweiss
notes, King's early biographers played along by pretty much writing
Ada Todd out of her husband's life and treating their relationship
as a distasteful lapse on his part. It was, of course, more than
that. It was a tragedy, because all King wanted was to marry the
woman he loved while maintaining the respect and amity of his white
family and friends. That was too much to ask of his time. A-
a Annette Gord on-Reed is the author of ""The Hemingses of
Monticello,""
aOne of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divideain
reverse.
Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King
enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian
Sandweiss (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen:
Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), he went through
life atempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of
losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the
world.a 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
aslumming.a That word, the author explains, denoted a
class-crossing afashionable amusement, a 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 ahinged not just on one
lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions.a 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 hewas on his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told
her the truth.
An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faithaand
also, as Sandweiss observes, alove and longing that transcends the
historical bounds of time and place.aa
a"Kirkus Reviews"
aSandweiss ("Print the Legend") serves a delicious brew of public
accomplishment and domestic intrigue in this dual biography of the
geologist-explorer Clarence King (1842-1901) and Ada Copeland (c.
1861-1964), a ablack, working-class womana who was aborn a slave.a
Rendered as fiction, this true tale, would seem quite
implausible-aa model son of Newport and one of the most admired
scientists in America, a Clarence kept secret for 13 years his
marriage to Ada and their apparently contented domestic life. He
kept his patrician past and celebrated present concealed as well
from his wife, who believed herself the wife of James Todd, a black
Pullman porter. Sandweiss provides a fascinating account of King's
aextraordinary double life as an eminent white scientist and a
black workingmana; Ada's struggle athrough the legal system to
assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial
history, and [unsuccessfully] claim the trust fund she believed to
be hersa; and rich insights into the adistinctive American ideas
about racea that allowed King to apass the other way across the
color line, claiming African ancestry when he had none at all.a A
remarkable feat of research and reporting that covers the long
century from Civil War to Civil Rights, "Passing Strange" tells a
uniquely American story of self- invention, love, deception and
race.a
a"Publishers Weekly" (starred review Feb.)
a"Passing Strange" tells anastounding true story that would beggar
most novelistsa imaginationsa] A fine, mesmerizing account.a
aJanet Maslin, "The New York Times"
a[Sandweiss is] a curious, talented writera] she tells [Clarence
Kingas story] with a scholaras rigor and a storytelleras vervea] A
sophisticated work of scholarship.a
a"Columbia Journalism Review"
aElaborate and incrediblea] Remarkable.a
a"Bookpage"
aSandweiss serves a delicious brew of public accomplishment and
domestic intriguea] Fascinating.a
a"Publishers Weekly, starred review"
aOne of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial divideain
reverse. 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. An intriguing look at long-held secrets.a
a"Kirkus Reviews"
aAlthough "Passing Strange" reads like a suspenseful novel, it
introduces us to a real American hero who lived a fascinating life
on both sides of the color line. Sandweiss gives us a great lesson
in American history that spans three generations.a aLawrence Otis
Graham, author of "Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper
Class"
a"Passing Strange" combines remarkable detective work, riveting
storytelling, and the enduring question of race to fashion a most
unusual but very American family saga about a famous white man and
a heretofore unknown black woman. This book is a stunning
achievement and example of just how deeply race is woven into our
history, our imaginations, and our lives. Ada Copeland, who became
a Todd, and then a King, rescued from obscurity by a talented
historian, steals the show.a
aDavid W. Blight, Yale University, and author of "A Slave No More:
Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of
Emancipation"
a"Passing Strange" is a masterful work of scholarship, and a deeply
moving human story well told. Here is a riveting new narrative
about a hidden history of American race relations, one filled with
love, deception and utmost tragedy on both sides of the color
line.a
aNeil Henry, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of
California at Berkeley, author of "Pearl's Secret"
a"Passing Strange" is an irresistible story of love and deception
beautifully told. But it is also a major contribution to our
understanding of race, class, and gender. This biography of a
secret interracial marriage also tells more about the social
experience of big city lifeaNew York in this caseathan a shelf full
of urban histories.a
aThomas Bender, New York University, author of "The Unfinished
City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea"
aThis is a wonderfully intelligent and haunting book about love and
race and secrets and revelations. The secrets were personal, and
closely guarded. In showing how and why they remained secret, Marni
Sandweiss reveals much about the American past and the American
present.a
aRichard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History,
Stanford University, author of "The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires
and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815"
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