Emeritus Professor Lori Ginzberg Publishes New Book

The Penn State History Department is proud to announce that Dr. Lori Ginzberg’s new book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History, is now available for purchase online and in stores.  The following description of the book comes from the University of North Carolina Press.

“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.” (From University of North Carolina Press. “Tangled Journeys | Lori D. Ginzberg.”)

For those in the Philadelphia area, Dr. Ginzberg will be discussing Tangled Journeys with two members of the Sanders family – Beverly Brown and Elsa Lora – at her upcoming book launch on September 19th.  They will be joined by former and current curators of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Krystal Appiah and Erika Piola.  For more information on this event, please visit the The Library Company of Philadelphia‘s website.

Check out Dr. Ginzberg’s recent interview in History Today, and let us know what you think of Tangled Journeys!