Tangled Journeys

“Ginzberg meticulously unravels the ‘tangled’ threads of a family’s fascinating story. . . . And she does so with an intense vulnerability rarely seen in academic publications. . . . [A]n ambitious, deeply compelling, and mildly frustrating book, as Ginzberg’s own exasperation with history’s ‘infuriating gaps’ jumps off the page. . . . It constantly pushed me to confront the difficulties of doing history alongside the joy we get from telling a good story.”—Journal of Southern History

“Readers will find Tangled Journeys a rich, well-told history that has as many unexpected turns as its title implies.”—Emerging Civil War

“Lori D. Ginzberg has written another masterful book. . . . This book is an important template for writing a family’s journey entangled by standard themes of American historical narrative: a depiction of how slavery, freedom, economic change, war, and racial violence collide with feelings of ambition, loyalty, pride, shame, and love.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“A thoughtful reconstruction of a family and its linkages to significant, though often overlooked, aspects of American history. . . . Recommended.”—CHOICE

“Ginzberg wonders what may have shaped or forced her subjects' decisions, inviting the reader to share in that frustration and guesswork. It has the effect of teaching the reader that they, too, are 'making' history.”—American Historical Review

“Ginzberg has hit the ball out of the park with Tangled Journeys. Knitting together sources from Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, Ginzberg traces fragmented records to reveal how slavery and empire collided to create blood kin who could be neither recognized nor acknowledged legally in the United States. The result is a genealogical quilt that reveals the pernicious nature of slavery and also the warmth of kinship via the Sanders family. We learn of the resilience of Black people whose very existence resisted fictions about their erasure.”—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

“In this sweeping history, Lori Ginzberg offers us a deep and compelling route through which to understand the impact of Black life on the history of the nation. Centered on the ancestors and descendants of Sarah Martha Sanders, this is much more than the history of a family. Through a meticulous and lyrical engagement with their movements, their property, their freedom, and their enslavement, we learn something crucial about the intimate evolution of race, class, and capitalism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. Read this book. It will change the way you see Black, American, and women’s history.”—Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic