The Stained Glass Window (2025)

The Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958

“At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection.” –Wall Street Journal

The Stained Glass Window tells the national story across the lives of four of my own family units: two of them white (Kings and Belvins); the third free and colored (the Bells): the fourth an up-from-slavery success (the Lewises).  It starts by relocating the exceptionalist paradigm in the antebellum South---in a commonwealth based on caste, unfree labor, and staple crops (tobacco, rice, sugar, and above all cotton). It makes the central contention that we’ve looked in the wrong place and at the wrong race for the genesis of the American story.  The vaunted paradigm American Exceptionalism has obscured the truth that what is truly exceptionalist about the exceptionalist narrative are the historic exceptions to it---notably , people of color.    

 It contends that the good news is the emerging historical revisionism upending the master narrarive of Jeffersonian/Jacksonian democracy with its unrivaled industrial takeoff, its robust middle classes gloriously replenished by hardworkingimmigrants, its eschatology of white merit. The new 1619 narrative shows that American slavery functioned as a vast, efficient concentration camp from which flowed the enormous wealth that underpinned the commercial  and financial paramountcy of New York and Philadelphia and the rise of the industrial north. The success of my book is that it wraps the lives of these kings, Belvins, Bells, and Lewises around almost two hundred forty years of North American history.  TheStained Glass Window claims to be an exceptional book not only, or not merely, in that explains macro-history as family history.  It is unique in that the book’s author tells four stories about his own origins within the folds of the antebellum slavery project and then of the long national separate-but-equal aftermath whose inconclusive end has guaranteed our inconclusive present.

Endorsements

Kai Bird Leon, Levy Biography Center

“Poignant and shocking. A graceful memoir-cum-history by an acclaimed biographer who finally turns his exceptional talents inward to explore a past he ‘barely knew’---his own family history---and it tuns out to be a riveting multigenerational American story.”

Gary M. Pomerantz, Stanford

“There is a magisterial quality to all of David Levering Lewis’s work. . . . Now, in Thee 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---t’s magisterial, too.”

Nell Irvin Painter, Berlin Academy

“David Levering Lewis’s usual sly eloquence braids history, politics, and genealogy, taking his family from slavery to freedom, from the erection of segregation to glimmers of its demise. An American story told with sophistication, warmth, and intimacy.”

Chad Williams, Boston U.

“. . . David Levering Lewis again confirms why he is one of the greatest historians of our time. Lewis takes himself and his familial genealogy as subject matter, narrating a multigenerational saga of Black life, in all its twists, turns, contradictions and complexities.  The book is revelatory for what it unveils about the author, but , just as powerfully, for what it unveils about America.”

The Wall Street Journal

 “‘The Stained Glass Window’ is in part a travel book, the chronicle of a journey, literally and figuratively, of discovery that was . . . a searing passage for its author. The journey, as he says, illuminated how ‘Africans in America had been both unique victims and unimpeachable critics of a nation corrupted at its inception by a political economy anchored to slavery’ Central to this narrative is the view that  ‘American slavery functioned as a vast concentration camp from which  flowed the enormous wealth that made the industrial North possible and the surplus capital upon which the commercial and industrial paramountcy of New York and Philadelphia was built.’”

The Washington Post

“In the opening pages of his fascinating and important new book, historian David Levering Lewis sits in an Atlanta church beneath a stained glass window that depicts his maternal grandmother as the Madonna. . . His grandmother had died in childbirth in 1901 and age 29 and was clearly revered, and yet Lewis, for all his years as an eminent scholar of American history, had little information about her---or, for that matter, his ancestry at all.”

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution

 “Through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Lewis dedicates considerable focus to the experiences of his family members, their stories of survival.”

The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“”The Stained Glass Window’ is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year of two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt---with interest.”