{"id":44426,"date":"2016-06-17T20:31:16","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T20:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44426"},"modified":"2019-08-21T22:44:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T22:44:54","slug":"the-strange-career-of-william-ellis-the-texas-slave-who-became-a-mexican-millionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44426","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/books.wwnorton.com\/books\/detail.aspx?ID=4294990726\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wwnorton.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">W. W. Norton &amp; Company<\/a><br \/>\n2016-06-14<br \/>\n368 pages<br \/>\n6.1 \u00d7 9.3 in<br \/>\nHardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-23925-6<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/karljacoby.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Karl Jacoby<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of History<br \/>\n<em>Columbia University, New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/books.wwnorton.com\/books\/detail.aspx?ID=4294990726\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cdn.wwnorton.com\/booktitles\/10930\/img\/cover\/9780393239256_300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Winner of the 2017 Phillis Wheatley Award for nonfiction from the Harlem Book Fair<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.<\/p>\n<p>A black child born in the twilight of slavery, William Henry Ellis inhabited a world of fraught, ambiguous racial categories on the anarchic border between the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">United States<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mexico\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mexico<\/a>. He adopted the name Guillermo Enrique Eliseo and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">passed<\/a> as a Mexican: traveling as Hispanic in first-class train berths, staying in the finest hotels, and eating in leading restaurants. A shrewd businessman, he became fabulously wealthy and found himself involved in scandalous trials, unexpected disappearances, and diplomatic controversies. Constantly switching identities, Eliseo was a genius at identifying and exploiting the porousness of the color line and the border line.<\/p>\n<p>Through Ellis\u2019s picaresque biography, Karl Jacoby presents an intriguing narrative set in a secret and ever-changing world. <em>The Strange Career of William Ellis<\/em> reinterprets the borderlands, showing how U.S. and Mexican histories intertwined during <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reconstruction_Era\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reconstruction<\/a>, and he offers new insight into the arbitrary and evolving definitions of race in America.<\/p>\n<p>Visit the website <a href=\"https:\/\/www.williamhellis.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1245,11,21,459,8,103,17,6462,6940,20],"tags":[22157,19293,19295,1300,19294,22156],"class_list":["post-44426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-books","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mexico","category-monographs","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-guillermo-enrique-eliseo","tag-karl-jacoby","tag-w-h-ellis","tag-w-w-norton-company","tag-william-ellis","tag-william-henry-ellis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44426"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57428,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44426\/revisions\/57428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}