Julie Winch

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome UMass Boston professor of history JULIE WINCH for a discussion of her newest book, The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America.

The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixed race, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The Clamorgans is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white. It is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch’s remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide.

"There's enough roguishness and propriety, fakery and deceit, true love and abandonment in Winch's history of the Clamorgan clan to sustain a TV miniseries.... Although presidents get drawn in, and cases rise to the Supreme Court, this is essentially the saga of a singular American family and their dynasty-like preoccupation with the acquisition of land, money, and power, and later attempts to recoup (or at least leverage) them." —Publishers Weekly