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Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss (384
pages)

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling
author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King was named by John Hay “the
best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport:
for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a
black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed
across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada King, only on his deathbed.
Noted historian of the American West Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to
conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a
uniquely American “race,” an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children. Passing
Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the “Todds”
wedding in 1888 to the 1964 death of Ada, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery, to finally the legacy
inherited by Clarence King’s granddaughter, who married a white man and adopted a white child in order to spare her
family the legacies of racism.

A remarkable feat of research and reporting spanning the Civil War to the civil rights era, Passing Strange tells a uniquely
American story of self-invention, love, deception, and race