
The Stained Glass Window
A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
David Levering Lewis(Author)
The Penguin Press
Published on 11. February 2025
Book
Hardback
384 pages
978-1-9848-7990-5 (ISBN)
Description
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.
“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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Penguin Putnam Inc
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
22 B&W PHOTOS T/O; 2 MAPS; 1 FAMILY TREE
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 37 mm
Weight
550 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-9848-7990-5 (9781984879905)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
02/2025
Penguin Press
€13.49
Available for download
Person
David Levering Lewis