Tag: Martha A. Sandweiss

  • Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages The New York Times 2015-06-28 Rachel L. Swarns Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife…

  • What was race anyway? That’s the big question Miss Anne’s actions raised. If race was simply a myth or fiction, could one reimagine racial identity as something based on affiliation rather than blood? Some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance asked much the same thing. In Nella Larsen’s “Passing” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography…

  • Uptown Girls Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2013-09-22 Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History Princeton University Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan Illustrated. 505 pp. Harper. Time hasn’t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. As philanthropists and activists, authors…

  • Love in black and white Princeton Alumni Weekly 2009-04-22 Lawrence Otis Graham ’83 Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United…

  • Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity News at Princeton Princeton University 2009-12-17 Jennifer Greenstein Altmann For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a…

  • American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King National Public Radio 2010-08-18 Steve Inskeep, Host Morning Edition U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd.…

  • Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line The Penguin Press 2009-02-05 384 pages 5.98 x 9.01in Hardcover ISBN 9781594202001 Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History Princeton University National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman…