In an email interview, the historian and biographer shared why it was “time to look closer to home,” and praised the “most honest presidential memoir” yet. SCOTT HELLER
What books are on your night stand?
David Greenberg, “John Lewis: A Life”; Joshua Green, “The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics”; Martha Hodes, “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering”; Michael Cook, “A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity.”
What’s the last great book you read?
The autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant. It is the most honest presidential memoir to date.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Ibn Hazm’s “The Ring of the Dove,” translated by A.J. Arberry (1953). An 11th-century treatise on Muslim love.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
I read Edith Wharton’s “In Morocco” while staying with my partner Dolores Root in Casablanca five or six years ago. Wharton visited the French protectorate to write a book that would appeal to tourists. Our hotel featured her clever work of propaganda on its shelves. I had missed it when I wrote “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.”
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
My reading has followed the course of my work. My 1962 dissertation on Emmanuel Mounier and the liberal crisis within French Catholicism demanded a level of Francophone reading that has greatly diminished. Historical biography and the civil rights bibliography take most of my time these days. But I am determined to do much more reading of novels and memoirs.
Why write “The Stained Glass Window” now?
In the early Trump era, a white taxi driver provoked me with a comment professing total innocence of racism on behalf of all his ancestors. After a professional career focused on the large world, rather than the immensely revelatory personal one, I realized it was time to look closer to home. “The Stained Glass Window” seeks to shift the fundamentals of our national story by retelling that story across the lives of four of my own family lines: two of them white (the Kings and the Belvins); the third free and colored (the Bells); the fourth an up-from-slavery success (the Lewises). My book wraps the lives of these Kings, Belvins, Bells and Lewises around almost 200 years of North American history. It explains macro-history as family history.
Were there personal histories or memoirs that inspired you?
“The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero,” by Peter S. Canellos.
Is there a family member you came across in your research whom you wish you could learn more about?
My enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. During my research, I came across the receipt of a bill of sale of several enslaved people. Two of the seven purchased in 1822 — William, age 1, and Elsy, age 2 — had produced three daughters and two sons by 1849; their oldest was Clarissa, born in 1835. A line slicing through Clarissa’s name directed my eyes to the faded penciled notation in her master’s hand: “Sold, September 1852.” I realized that this young woman must be the mother of Alice, my grandmother.
Which scholarly pathways in African American history have been an exciting surprise to you?
The use of genealogists. Listening carefully to what the archives appear not to tell us.
What book would you recommend for understanding America’s current political moment?
Self-serving or not, my last book, “The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order.” The book described a responsible capitalism free of zero-sum fatalism, and visionary enough to embrace a modernizing global north and south (and racially equitable United States). I might add Richard Slotkin’s 2024 “A Great Disorder; National Myth and the Battle for America.”
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
W.E.B. Du Bois, Wendell Phillips and Zora Neale Hurston.
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