Lori D. Ginzberg is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. This interview is based on her new book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write Tangled Journeys?
LG: It was a circuitous route, to say the least. I was (and remain) interested in why the so-called grand narrative of American history has not been transformed by a half century’s work in women’s and African American history; the stories of marginalized people, while popular with scholars, students, and readers, remain too often in literal boxes in textbooks and on store shelves. In the process of grappling with this quandary (honestly, I was bored and so wandered over to see what an archivist was working on), I was introduced to the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This set of family papers — which told the all-too-common story of a slaveowner purchasing and having children with an enslaved girl alongside his highly unusual act of moving with his formally-enslaved children to Philadephia – was also extraordinary because the papers themselves survived. Working with this archive and following its many paths gave me the opportunity to imagine what U.S. history would look like with this family, its ancestors and its descendents, at its center.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Tangled Journeys?
LG: Tangled Journeys, in contrast to my previous books, does not so much make a specific argument as it invites readers into the process of exploring one family’s place in making U.S. history. It asks them to imagine what we cannot know from the sources, to stretch meaning from the silences, and to consider how this family’s story — its traumas, violence, loyalty, and love — reshapes our understanding of the past.
JF: Why do we need to read Tangled Journeys?
LG: Why do we read history at all? The obvious answer is that Tangled Journeys, which is transAtlantic, multiracial, sprawling across time, adds new stories to the crazy quilt of U.S. history. But history is more than stories, something made evident by the conservative opponents of multicultural, antiracist, feminist analyses of history, who declare that we are shredding a common, patriotic fabric. They know that history is dangerous. This book — along with so many others — reminds us that there never was a common fabric, that people’s stories get told only if sources remain and if someone thinks their lives mattered, and that however much we wish for platitudes and happy endings, history is complicated.
JF: Why and when did you become an Am​erican historian?
LG: During my first year in college, I took a course on the history of the Russian Revolution with a Marxist professor. What I learned was thrilling: historians disagreed with one another! They asked particular questions, examined evidence, and then interpreted the past in ways that differed widely. As a young radical feminist, it was questions in American women’s history that I found most compelling – why did so many women seem to accept and even embrace systems of marriage, religion, and motherhood that seemed, to my 18-year-old self, so self-evidently oppressive? I fell in love and never looked back.
JF: What is your next project?
LG: I wish I knew. I still have many questions about the past, present, and future that I believe historical investigation and analysis can help resolve: why and how do people put so much effort into declaring some ideas “unthinkable”? How do those ideas get expressed in ways that change intellectual life? What happens to “commonsense” or “universal” ideas if we poke them hard enough? I will continue to struggle with these issues, but I don’t yet know what stories I will come upon that will let me do the historian’s work of pulling apart and reshuffling the pieces.
JF: Thanks, Lori!