In 1830 Richard Walpole Cogdell, a husband, father, and bank clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Before her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house and where they became, virtually overnight, part of the African American middle class. An ambitious historical narrative about the Sanders family, Tangled Journeys tells a multigenerational, multiracial story that is both traumatic and prosaic while forcing us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented in the archives, and thereby inviting us into the process of American history making itself.
Lori D. Ginzberg is Professor Emeritus of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University, as well as the author of several books, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life and Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York.
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