Tangled Journeys: One Family's Story and the Making of American History

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.

Author: Lori D. Ginzberg
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/17/2024
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781469679952