The Stained Glass Window Audiobook By David Levering Lewis cover art

The Stained Glass Window

A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958

Pre-order: Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Stained Glass Window

By: David Levering Lewis
Pre-order: Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $20.48

Pre-order for $20.48

Confirm pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

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 this book, 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.

©2025 David Levering Lewis (P)2025 Penguin Audio
Black & African American Cultural & Regional Great Britain
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about The Stained Glass Window

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.