The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958

The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - Hardcover

$35.00
$35.00
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The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
  • The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - Hardcover

The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - Hardcover

by David Levering Lewis
$35.00
$35.00

Book Overview

A Top 100 Book by the Schomburg Library

"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.
ISBN9781984879905
Author David Levering Lewis
PublisherPenguin Press
GenreHistory
FormatHardcover
PublishedFebruary 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages384
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

History Nonfiction

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More by David Levering Lewis

A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress

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About David Levering Lewis

David Lewis is the editor of Pencil Drawing Techniques, Oil Painting Techniques, Watercolor Painting Techniques, and Landscape Painting Techniques.

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