Tangled Journeys

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 <i>Tangled Journeys</i> 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.