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Product Identifiers

PublisherPenguin Publishing Group

ISBN-101984879901

ISBN-139781984879905

eBay Product ID (ePID)22067506125

Product Key Features

Book TitleStained Glass Window : a Family History As the American Story, 1790-1958

Number of Pages384 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2025

TopicSocial History, Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century, United States / General, African American

IllustratorYes

GenreHistory

AuthorDavid Levering Lewis

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.2 in

Item Weight19.2 Oz

Item Length9.5 in

Item Width6.4 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2024-019978

TitleLeadingThe

Reviews"In this arresting and highly original book, David Levering Lewis weaves together family saga, layers of personal memory, Southern history from the Colonial era to the mid-twentieth century, and the Black experience of trials and some notable triumphs. The book will impress readers not only for its meticulous research and elegant prose, but also by its clarity of thought and reckoning with the moral ambiguities and injuries of the American past. That past was implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's 1935 statement, 'Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.' The task, said Du Bois, was to tell 'the truth about all this.' In excavating one Black family's tale, David Levering Lewis compels close scrutiny of the contradiction of America's promise of freedom for all and the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial harms since, reaching deep even into our own time. Yet the fight for 'the truth' and genuine equality has persisted and, judging by the chronicle of this distinguished African-American family, will continue for however long the United States needs to fulfill its better self." --Professor David Mayers, author of America and the Postwar World, "With the acumen of an award-winning historian, Lewis writes about his remarkable family's story of white enslavers and Black strivers as the nation's own." --Paula J. Giddings, E.A. Woodson Professor, emerita, Smith College and author of IDA, A Sword Among Lions "There is a magisterial quality to all of David Levering Lewis's work. His two scintillating volumes on W.E.B. Du Bois offer a master class in the art of biography. Now in The Stained Glass Window , Lewis produces a meditation about race and family in America, chronicling his own family's rise from slavery. It's a genealogical tour de force and--no surprise!--it's magisterial, too." --Gary M. Pomerantz, author of Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn "An epic narrative history, written with characteristic grace and insight, of a nation vainly obsessed with its supposed perfection but horribly disfigured by its contradictions--and of the singular, profoundly sympathetic family which emerged, against the odds, from the knee-buckling ironies and contingencies of American life. The Stained Glass Window left me breathless." -- Matthew Guterl, author of Skinfolk "In this arresting and highly original book, David Levering Lewis weaves together family saga, layers of personal memory, Southern history from the Colonial era to the mid-twentieth century, and the Black experience of trials and some notable triumphs. The book will impress readers not only for its meticulous research and elegant prose, but also by its clarity of thought and reckoning with the moral ambiguities and injuries of the American past. That past was implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's 1935 statement, 'Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.' The task, said Du Bois, was to tell 'the truth about all this.' In excavating one Black family's tale, David Levering Lewis compels close scrutiny of the contradiction of America's promise of freedom for all and the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial harms since, reaching deep even into our own time. Yet the fight for 'the truth' and genuine equality has persisted and, judging by the chronicle of this distinguished African-American family, will continue for however long the United States needs to fulfill its better self." --Professor David Mayers, author of America and the Postwar World, "An epic narrative history, written with characteristic grace and insight, of a nation vainly obsessed with its supposed perfection but horribly disfigured by its contradictions--and of the singular, profoundly sympathetic family which emerged, against the odds, from the knee-buckling ironies and contingencies of American life. The Stained Glass Window left me breathless." -- Matthew Guterl, author of Skinfolk "In this arresting and highly original book, David Levering Lewis weaves together family saga, layers of personal memory, Southern history from the Colonial era to the mid-twentieth century, and the Black experience of trials and some notable triumphs. The book will impress readers not only for its meticulous research and elegant prose, but also by its clarity of thought and reckoning with the moral ambiguities and injuries of the American past. That past was implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's 1935 statement, 'Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.' The task, said Du Bois, was to tell 'the truth about all this.' In excavating one Black family's tale, David Levering Lewis compels close scrutiny of the contradiction of America's promise of freedom for all and the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial harms since, reaching deep even into our own time. Yet the fight for 'the truth' and genuine equality has persisted and, judging by the chronicle of this distinguished African-American family, will continue for however long the United States needs to fulfill its better self." --Professor David Mayers, author of America and the Postwar World

Synopsis"At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir... [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection." - Wall Street Journal National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story. There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis's lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia. Lewis's father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall's collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window , Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them. In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.

LC Classification NumberE185.92.L49 2025