Books

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.

 King: A Biography (1970)

Acclaimed by leading historians and critics when it appeared shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this foundational biography wends through the corridors in which King held court, posing the right questions and providing a keen measure of the man whose career and mission enthrall scholars and general readers to this day. Updated with a new preface and more than a dozen photographs of King and his contemporaries, this edition presents the unforgettable story of King's life and death for a new generation.

 Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1974)

The Dreyfus Affair began with the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Army’s most promising Jewish officer, who was falsely accused of passing as the cause célébre of the nineteenth century, the Affair not only of France but of the world, an event that was eventually to cause mass protests in Europe and America, produce Emile Zola’s ringing J’Accuse, and involve most of the leading international figures of the day.

Even today, this story of high drama that almost caused the downfall of a government is startingly relevant. For Prisoners of Honour tells how ambitious government officials framed Alfred Dreyfus as a traitor, raising anti-Semitism to a national passion, and then offered ‘national security’ as the reason for covering up the crime they had committed, until the nation’s leaders, military and civilian, came to believe that the revelation of the truth might cause the government’s downfall and therefore bring dishonour to France.

As they became ‘Prisonors of Honour,’ so did the object of their persecution. No man would seem a less likely hero than Alfred Dreyfus— ambitious, officious, stiff and formal. But he was also a man of extraordinary courage. Convicted of high treason, publicly degraded, torn frmo his family and sent to Devil’s Island, he remained a patriot determined to have his innocence proclaimed so that he could restore the honour of the Army and the country he loved. Because of the efforts of a few courageous journalists, his brother Mathieu, some of the nation’s leading intellectuals and politicians, including members of the Senate, Alfred Dreyfus and justice - the man and the cause - finally triumphed.

District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History (1978)

When Americans think of Washington, D.C,. their first images are likely to be of marble statues, bombastic orators, and bureaucratic red tape. This Washington of government and politics, author David L. Lewis writes, has obscured an urban world of rich cultures and competing groups that make up the real city and give it a character of its own, apart from tourist sites and national politics.

Beginning with Pierre L’Enfant’s grand design in the days of George Washington, the city came to have ‘magnificent distances’ and ‘magnificent intentions.’ But its slowness in realizing expectations also made it what one wag called a ‘low-budget Constantinople,’ and its magnificent distances tended historically to be social and economic as well as visual, between groups of people as well as between places, producing frustration for permanent residents, particularly those who sought self-government.

Lewis writes about those who truly have lived in the city rather than just those who have sojourned politically in the Federal Triangle and on Capitol Hill. He examines also the city’s art, journalism, and internal politics, along with the changing nature of its many distinct neighborhoods, and he considers the special meaning of the city historically for black Americans, who are now its racial majority.

This look behind the marble curtain of our national capital will be of great interest to all Americans, whether they come to tour, to politic, to live.

 When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981)

Tremendous optimism filled the streets of Harlem during the decade and a half following World War I. Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, and countless others began their careers; Afro-America made its first appearance on Broadway; musicians found new audiences in the chic who sought out the exotic in Harlem's whites-only nightclubs; riotous rent parties kept economic realities at bay; and A'Lelia Walker and Carl Van Vechten outdid each other with glittering "integrated" soires.

When Harlem Was in Vogue recaptures the excitement of those times, displaying the intoxicating hope that black Americans could create important art and compel the nation to recognize their equality. In this critically-acclaimed study of race assimilation, David Levering Lewis focuses on the creation and manipulation of an arts and belles-lettres culture by a tiny Afro-American elite, striving to enhance "race relations" in America, and ultimately, the upward mobility of the Afro-American masses. He demonstrates how black intellectuals developed a systematic program to bring artists to Harlem, conducting nation-wide searches for black talent and urging WASP and Jewish philanthropists (termed "Negrotarians" by Zora Neale Hurston) to help support writers.

This extensively-researched, fascinating volume reveals the major significance of the Renaissance as a movement which sprang up in Harlem but lent its mood to the entire era, and as a culturally-vital period whose after-effects continue to add immeasurably to the richness and character of American life.

 The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (1988)

Before 1870, the abandoned Egyptian fortress at Fashoda, on an obscure juncture of the White Nile, meant little to the outside world or, indeed. to most Africans. But suddenly, because of emerging rivalries between the Western powers, the rise of European colonialism, and its own strategic location, Fashoda became the focal point of an intense and bloody campaign involving England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. This struggle also, unwittingly gave rise to a burgeoning resistance movement on the part of Black Africa—a movement that would culminate in the independence rebellions of the twentieth century.

Based on a wealth of previously unpublished documents, The Race to Fashoda tells intense, fascinating detail the story of Europe's incursions into Africa in the nineteenth century—and, for the first time, tells it from the perspective of the Africans themselves, many of whom were waging an arduous, often successful war against encroachment. Along the way David Levering Lewis demonstrates how the race to Fashoda, one of the most grueling episodes in the "Scramble for Africa," fostered the European political tensions that would lead inexorably to World War I and forever change the face of the Western world.

Here is a story as complex and stirring as any adventure tale, with a cast of characters to match: the driven, manipulative explorer Henry Mort on Stanley, who slaughtered thousands for the benefit of the front pages back home; African resistance fighters Tippu Tip and Samori Ture among the first to organize their compatriots against the European onslaught; Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, the consummate career officer, who fought the Africans, the British, and his country's unstable political climate to be the first to reach Fashoda—only to be ordered, once there, to hand it over to the British; Herbert Kitchener, Marchand's great rival, whose ingenious railroad brought him closer and closer to victory as the race drew to its climax; Abdullahi, the Sudan's xenophobic khalifa, who paradoxically found himself ruler of the continent's most contested piece of real estate; King Leopold II of Belgium, who pursued his share of the Congo with the sly acquisitiveness of a spoilt child; the shrewd Ethiopian monarch Menilek II, who swiftly learned how to use European vanity and conflicting interests to his own advantage; and the enigmatic Austrian Jew Eduard Schnitzer, who, as "Emin Pasha;" retreated into the jungle and commanded a private native army with all the resourcefulness of Conrad's Mr. Kurtz.

With its dramatic reconstructions and provocative viewpoint, The Race to Fashoda will stand as an insightful, compelling addition to our understanding of this key moment in modern history.

 W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography

The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volume

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose, Lewis chronicles Du Bois’s long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.

W.E.B. Du Bois is a 1993 and 2000 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction and the winner of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

 God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008)

At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe. David Levering Lewis's masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and the creation of Muslim Spain. Five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe followed, from the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Hispania in 711 to Latin Christendom's declaration of unconditional warfare on the Caliphate in 1215. Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished--a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--while proto-Europe, defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. A cautionary tale, God's Crucible provides a new interpretation of world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today's headlines.

The Improbably Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country and Conceived a New World Order (2018)

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner comes this surprising portrait of Wendell Willkie, the businessman–turned–presidential candidate who (almost) saved America’s dysfunctional political system.

Hailed as “the definitive biography of Wendell Willkie” (Irwin F. Gellman), The Improbable Wendell Willkie offers an “engrossing and enlightening appraisal” (Ira Katznelson) of a prominent businessman and Wall Street attorney presidential candidate who could have saved America’s sclerotic political system. Although Willkie lost to FDR in 1940, acclaimed historian David Levering Lewis demonstrates that the story of this Hoosier- born corporate chairman’s life is “a powerful reminder of practical bipartisanship, visionary internationalism, and committed civil liberties and civil rights” (Katrina vanden Heuvel). Popular for his downhome mid-western charm and unaffected candor, Willkie possessed a supple intellect and a concealed disdain for political opportunism that, had he not died prematurely, would have revolutionized American politics with its advocacy of bipartisanship and social responsibility. “Meticulously researched and brilliantly written” (Douglas Brinkley), The Improbable Wendell Willkie “brings the now largely unknown Willkie to a new generation” (The New Yorker), reclaiming the legacy of an American icon.