The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire - Couverture rigide

Jacoby, Karl

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 039323925X ISBN 13 : 9780393239256

Editeur : WW Norton & Co, 2016

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

A black child born in the twilight of slavery, William Henry Ellis inhabited a world of fraught, ambiguous racial categories on the anarchic border between the United States and Mexico. He adopted the name Guillermo Enrique Eliseo and passed as a Mexican: traveling as Hispanic in first-class train berths, staying in the finest hotels, and eating in leading restaurants. A shrewd businessman, he became fabulously wealthy and found himself involved in scandalous trials, unexpected disappearances and diplomatic controversies. Constantly switching identities, Eliseo was a genius at identifying and exploiting the porousness of the colour line and the border line. Through Ellis's picaresque biography, Karl Jacoby presents an intriguing narrative set in a secret and ever-changing world. The Strange Career of William Ellis reinterprets the borderlands, showing how U.S. and Mexican histories intertwined during Reconstruction, and he offers new insight into the arbitrary and evolving definitions of race in America.

Biographie de l'auteur :

Karl Jacoby is a professor of history at Columbia University. He has won the Albert J. Beveridge Award and a Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honours.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: WW Norton & Co
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 039323925X
• ISBN 13: 9780393239256
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 336