The Sanders Family of Philadelphia

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Sarah Martha Sanders was born on February 8, 1815, to an enslaved woman named Juno. There is no record of who Sarah Martha's father was. We do know that she had a grandmother named Sarai. When Sarah Martha was six years old, the woman who enslaved her, the twice widowed Sabina Hall of Charleston, South Carolina, sat down to write her will. In this unusual will, Sabina Hall arranged for five of the people she enslaved to be hired out with part of their wages used to support Sarah Martha until she turned 21, because, "I have always been served with fidelity and integrity by my Negro slaves, Sarai and Juno." As Sabina Hall wrote her will, the South Carolina legislature had just outlawed the practice of enslavers freeing their own slaves, even upon the owner's death. Nonetheless, Sabina wrote that once Sarah Martha turned 21, everyone should keep their own wages and be emancipated. Whatever Sabina Hall intended, though she died six years later, and her wishes were not followed. In 1830, attorney Thomas D. Conde sold the then 15 year old Sarah Martha to Richard Walpole Cogdell for $450. Cogdell was a neighbor of Sabina Hall, and he sat on the Charleston City Council with her stepson, but whether he knew Sarah Martha before purchasing her is unknown.Thereafter, Sarah Martha, going from the home of Sabina Hall to that of Richard Cogdell, went by Sarah Martha Sanders, for reasons no one has yet been able to determine. In 1830, Richard Cogdell was married to Cecille Langlois, with whom he had five sons: James Gordon, Richard Clement, George Burgess, John Walpole and Charles Stevens. None of the sons would marry or have children of their own. Richard would outlive them all. Less than a year after Richard purchased Sarah Martha, she was pregnant with his child. In March, 1832, Sarah Martha, who had just turned 17, gave birth to Robert Sanders, the first of nine children she would bear to then 45 year old Richard Cogdell. In the pre Civil War South it was, sadly not unusual for men to rape the women they enslaved. Because the legal condition of the child followed that of the mother, the resulting children would also be his property. Generally, the wives, with little power of their own, were forced to accept the situation. In this case, though, Cecille moved out in fall of 1832. A few months later, she died. Over the next 18 years, Sarah Martha would bear Richard eight more children: Jacob who died at age seven, Julia E, Sarah Anne, Cordelia, John who died at nine days old, Sophia Elizabeth, Miranda who died at eight months old, and Florence who died at four years old. Sarah Martha herself died of childbed fever on September 20, 1850, 1 day after giving birth to Florence. She was only 35 years old. She was buried in the Black and Colored Cemetery on what was then Boundary Street in Charleston, in the same grave as her daughter Miranda. In the fall of 1856, Richard drafted a will outlining his desire for his children with Sarah Martha, to be allowed to remain living in a house on Friend Street in Charleston. His then only living child with Cecille, Charles, acknowledged this wish and agreed to it. In April, 1857, Robert Sanders married a free woman of color in Charleston, named Martha Julia Davenport at St Philip's Church, and then, just weeks after that wedding, for reasons that haven't been discovered in the written records, Richard bought a house at 1116 Fitzwater Street in Philadelphia and transferred ownership to his children with Sarah Martha. Soon thereafter, Richard, Robert, and his new wife, Martha, Julia, Sarah Ann, Cordelia, and Sophia moved to Philadelphia for good. The children took up residence at 1116 Fitzwater and Richard settled in at La Pierre House, a hotel just a few blocks away. Sophia sadly died at age 18 in 1865, and their father Richard died the following year in 1866. Charles Cogdell had passed away in 1860, leaving the four remaining Sanders children, Robert, Julia, Sarah Ann, and Cordelia, Richard's only surviving heirs. Robert returned to Charleston for the funeral. With the recent end of the Civil War, it was now safe for this former slave to accompany his father's body back to the former Confederacy. It's the only known instance of one of the Sanders children returning to South Carolina. It was Sarah Ann, the only one of the four who never married, who took control of the estate and dealt with their creditors. She died in 1871 at the age of 32. Robert, who was employed as a tailor, and his wife Martha, had no children. Robert died in 1907 and Martha in 1913. Cordelia, a teacher, moved to Brooklyn for a few years to teach at Colored School Number One in Fort Greene, writing home frequently. By 1871, she had returned to Philadelphia and married Willie Chew, a barber. They had two sons, Richard and Charles. Cordelia, like Sarah Anne, died of consumption when the boys were only eight and six. Cordelia's dear friend, Louisa Jacobs, daughter of abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, wrote of Cordelia, "It was a rare friendship, such as comes, but once in a lifetime." Willie Chew moved to Washington, DC, and died in 1892. Julia married carpenter Edward Venning in 1861, and they moved in with his parents. But in 1870, they moved back in with her family on Fitzwater Street. The couple had 10 children, two of whom died as babies and two as young children. Edward Venning died in 1884, and Julia died in 1910, at 73 years old. We know so much about the lives of the members of this family, in part because in the basement of the house at 1116 Fitzwater Street, for decades, they kept a collection of family documents dating back to the 1760s emigration of their ancestor, John Stevens, from England to South Carolina. Their descendants donated those documents to the Library Company of Philadelphia. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Professor Emeritus of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and author of, "Tangled Journeys: One Family's Story and the Making of American History." 

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:08  
Hi, Lori, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  12:10  
Thanks so much for having me, Kelly.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:12  
Yes, I am really excited to talk about your book, and I have a lot of sort of meta questions about it, but I want to start just by asking how you got interested in writing this book. You've written several books before. Why was this the story you wanted to tell now?

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  12:30  
Okay, this book came about through a fairly circuitous route. It is not going to impress anybody about the coherence of the scholarly method to hear this story. I am a historian of white middle class Protestant women, mostly in the 19th century. This is a very new venture for me in many ways, although it obviously uses the skills and expertise and perspectives that I've developed over the decades of writing books. When I was in college, a leading women's historian, Gerda Lerner, told us that when we were her age, women's history and African American history would have vanished, that because of the work we did, it would be obsolete and so embedded in the master narrative of American history that nobody would call it those but nobody would call the field by those names. This has not happened although, in spite of decades of wonderful work by women's and African American historians and historians of people marginalized by their gender and sexual identities, often those stories, those unsung stories, get sung to use your title of your podcast in little boxes in textbooks and lectures. And I was grappling with why that was still the case, and just didn't know how to rethink American history without that master narrative. So one day, I was wandering around the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I do a great deal of my research, and honestly, I got bored, so I wandered myself over to one of the archivists, Krista Lapia, who was in charge of the Africana collection, to bug her, and said, "What are you working on?" And she told me about the little diaries of a African American Girl in 1890 that she was transcribing and told me about the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew collection that had been donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia. This set of family papers was both extraordinary and ordinary on so many levels. They told this all too common story of a slave owner purchasing and having children with an enslaved girl, alongside his highly unusual act of moving with the five living children to Philadelphia, and the extraordinary random dumb luck of the papers being left in this African American family's basement in Philadelphia. And I got totally into the weeds. Getting out of the weeds in this book has been way harder than getting in, because I just couldn't imagine what kind of structure to use. So I got to it through a circuitous route, and I got stuck in it, um, for some years trying to figure out how American history would look if we put this family's story at the center. And what I think I ended up doing was writing a book that both tells the almost 200 year story of this family in the context of the papers that we have and the other sources that I've found, but also very explicitly, invites readers to join me in the project of figuring out what we can't know.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:28  
Yeah, I love that. And one of the things you do in this book is you put sections in italics where you say you're they're like the whispers, the the things that we can't know. Could you talk a little bit about that and why you decided to do that in this book? 

Speaker 1  15:42  
Well, one of the things that this book does have in common with my other books is that I like to poke at things, intellectually speaking, and see what would happen if we went under the rock that's covering whatever we're looking for and explored what was under there. In other works, I've said, what would happen if we look at questions that are declared unthinkable and thought them anyway. You know what would happen if we look into the work that goes into making some things unthinkable? So in my other books, I've poked at things in other ways. In this book, I have stretched sources as much as I at this time, possibly can, and certainly other people will do other work to find more. But I'm left with questions that I can neither answer nor let go of. And what I decided to do, as you said, was put some of these questions in italics to imagine some conversations. And I can give examples of some of those, if you like. There are some conversations that I just have absolutely no way to overhear. For instance, what happened in 1856 and 7 to make Richard Cogdell Sanders, who was legally the owner of his five remaining biracial children, to decide to buy them a house in Philadelphia and pick up and move with them, and never go back to Charleston. In the fall of 1856 they were not planning to leave. He had made arrangements for them to live securely in a house he already owned. But something happened in the next six months, and I don't know what it is. So I have one of my whispers, one of my italicized portions, where I tried to imagine some conversations that might have taken place. One quite plausible conversation, he had at that point three teenage daughters, is that one of his friends with whom he spent a night of partying and theater going, a common activity for him and other white Charlestonians, quite plausibly, one of his younger male friends noted that the daughters were now the same age that Sarah Martha Sanders, the enslaved girl he purchased at 15 who was their mother, had been when he raped and impregnated her. It's not impossible for him to have suddenly noticed that he could not protect his daughters. Their children would be enslaved. Just because we know that slavery is going to come to an end doesn't mean that he knew it, obviously. So I kind of, I don't make up a conversation. I'm not I don't have the creative imagination to write fiction, but I pretty explicitly, and I know that some readers don't like the word, perhaps, I pretty explicitly imagine the kinds of conversations that could have taken place to make them suddenly up and leave. I don't know who suggested it. I don't know whether they suggested to him that he was getting old and they would only take care of him if they moved. I don't know whether he said, "Wow, I just noticed that I can't protect you." His son, the only living son, Robert, just had married a free woman of color. Her children, their children, would not be enslaved. Perhaps someone noticed that his daughters had a different status. I just don't know what kind of conversations took place. So there are about, I don't know, 20 or so whispers like this throughout the book where I kind of throw my hands up and say to readers, "You're just going to have to imagine this with me."

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:01  
So one of the things I find so interesting in this story is it seems, from our perspective, from the modern perspective, that,of course, these children with their father moving from the south, where they are enslaved, to the north to Philadelphia, where they are free, where there is a large community of free African Americans, that this must be a more comfortable situation for them, that this must somehow be better. And in some ways, of course, it definitely is. But you talk about the ways in which their lives change and change in complicated ways, and that the past is not so easily understood from the perspective of the present. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 1  19:47  
I think I spend a lot of time grappling with questions about what's better, what freedom meant. I mean, Charleston was a majority Black city, and there were many, many free people of color, who I think the Sanders children associated with. I think that in some ways they, like many formerly enslaved Charlestonians who were especially the children of white fathers, I think in many ways they behaved as quasi free, to use a word that Amrita Chakrabarti Myers coined, African Americans in Charleston. There's a wonderful source that lists, like a census, the free Negroes in Charleston. And at one point, these young adults appear in it, but they're not free. In Charleston, after 1821, slave owners were not allowed to free their slaves, even if they wanted to. Their mother appears in it. She's also not free. But amazingly, through her name, someone has drawn a line. So the tax collector came along and knocked on the door and someone imagined or thought or assumed she was free, put her in the taxation book and then crossed her off. I think that we are not really prepared to deal with the ambiguities of what that life felt like. They clearly knew it was time to leave, but and certainly other African Americans were leaving both enslaved and free in the 1850s when things got really bad in Charleston. But I don't know what they knew. I mean, one of my whispers suggests the possibility, which a couple of my friends have been very aghast that I would suggest this, I've suggested the possibility that they didn't know they were enslaved. I don't know what they knew. There's no, they never talk about it. Much later, after emancipation, one of their northern born husbands and and one of the children himself, Robert Sanders, asks their minister to certify that they were married, and they only would do that if they knew that in some way their status had changed and could be questioned in terms of inheritance or the legitimacy, quote, unquote, of the children. But I don't know what they knew or what they could expect of their father. You know, I would love to overhear the conversation where they talk to their father, whoever initiated it, about going to Philadelphia, and what could they expect of him? They could not legally demand anything. So one of the things that goes against our expectations is that this family comes to Philadelphia, 1857, '58 and by the spring of 1858, they are entertaining in their parlor, Charlotte Forten, who would later be Charlotte Forten Grimke, the daughter, of daughter and niece of lead and grandchild of leading Philadelphia abolitionists. And Charlotte is very impressed with Cordelia Sanders. She finds her sparkling and very smart, and says she's very familiar with Shakespeare, and just describes this lively, lovely young woman whom she's befriended, and then says, "But I think I need to convert her to abolitionism," and gives her a book of Whittier's poetry to get her started. And when I first read that, I took I was a little taken aback, because our assumption is that, of course, these young, formerly enslaved people who've left Charleston for Philadelphia would be abolitionists. How could they not be? Our assumption is that African Americans would be abolitionists. It's not that clear. It's not that clear to me. It's not wasn't clear to Charlotte Forten, if she thought that Cordelia had to be converted. And it's not that clear to me what influence their father had over them. At one point, Charlotte Forten refers to their father as a conceited pro slavery southerner. What, to me, the most remarkable part of that story, aside from how it disrupts our expectations about who would be an abolitionist, is that Charlotte Forten, the daughter and granddaughter of leading abolitionists, would be sitting in the same parlor with Richard Cogdell, who had purchased a 15 year old slave and was sitting there with their children, and she could still describe as him as a conceited pro slavery southerner. That could not have happened in Charleston. That interaction is quite extraordinary and really shook some of my assumptions in ways that you know, history's supposed to make us uncomfortable, and it certainly did. Many points of writing this book made me, as I know it is already making my readers uncomfortable.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:10  
Yes, absolutely. So one of the most uncomfortable things to imagine, of course, is this relationship between Sarah Martha Sanders and Richard. And it's so striking, of course, that you know you're a historian of women's history. There are incredible women throughout this story, but the the central woman to the entire story is unvoiced. We have nothing in her words, in her writing. Can you talk a little bit about grappling with her story and her relationship with Richard and with her children?

Speaker 1  24:43  
It's an enormous chasm in this story that the person who is at is at its center, or at least the center, as I've described the story, is largely invisible in the sources. The only way we know that Sarah Martha Sanders exists is because enslavers kept records. Otherwise we would not even know that she exists, and the records we have about her are paltry. We have a bill of sale, which I have a picture of in the book. We have a will written by her original enslaver setting up a very elaborate plan to make her end up free, which didn't happen. And we have the text of a gravestone that her enslaver, Richard Cogdell, wrote about her. And we have her children. Really, the only sources that remain are her children. But we don't even know how much they talked about her. We don't know whether they discussed her on her birthday. The fact that we know her birth date, so prosaic a piece of information, the fact that we know her birth date, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of information in this story, but we know almost nothing. I've tried to imagine what it was like when she, a 15 year old, came into the Cogdell household. Richard Cogdell, at the time, was married to Cecille Langois Cogdell, had a bunch of sons still living at home. I can't imagine what was that was like. I've grappled with how to describe, you know, you refer to their relationship. I've grappled how to describe that. Presumably, it began with a rape, and we don't have the words yet to describe what ensued. We don't have the words to describe whether she was a concubine or a rape survivor or a mistress. I'm grappling with that pretty openly in this book, in the sense that I say, "What words do we have for this?" But I don't know how to describe the relationship, except to say, and I don't think this is made up, I mean, this is what I have, that there was enormous loyalty between Richard Cogdell and their children, loyalty that extended past his death, when one of his extraordinary daughters, Sarah Anne Sanders, settled his estate, writing to white lawyers in the south and in New York, a friend of his in New York, trying to settle this and protect her father's honor, was amazing to me. So I guess, I guess, what I wanted to say about Sarah Martha Sanders is that when I imagine her, I have to imagine someone who was both a 15 or 16 year old victim of a middle aged man, but also someone who managed somehow to pass an enormous amount of dignity and discipline and self regard onto her children. And I think both of those are true. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:37  
Yes, I want to talk about the children, the daughters, especially. They are, as you said in the beginning, both extraordinary and, of course, ordinary in some ways, but it's extraordinary that we have this level of access to what their lives were like. So could you talk some about what what it is they do there? Most of them are educators in some way. They're they're thinking, they're fairly strong willed. So could you talk some about what, what they're like, what we're able to learn, not just about this family, but what we might, in general, be able to learn about free African American women at this time? 

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  28:17  
Well, we do have an extraordinary amount about them, but we don't have what we much of what we wish we had, which is detailed, emotional in depth diaries and so forth. We have correspondence between them, and so we know more about some of them than others. We know more about Cordelia, for instance, because she moved to Brooklyn for a couple of years and wrote letters home. And when she was young, she kept a kind of scrapbook of poetry and frilly cards and so on. So what we know is greatly constrained by the sources, but if you stretch them enough, you can find out extraordinary things. For instance, the oldest daughter, Julia Sanders, who married Edward Venning, so she's Julia Sanders Venning had quite a large number of children. Like her mother, she had nine or 10 children, most of them died before she did. We know very little about her other than these numbers, the numbers of births and deaths and hardship that she went through, it's quite extraordinary and tells us a great deal about her. But by stretching the sources, what we also know about her is that at one point her younger sister Cordelia, wrote to her, "I know your life has not been what you hoped." I have no way of knowing what those hopes were, but we know a little bit of what they expressed by reading one another's letters. I don't know, for instance, what Sarah Anne Sanders' life was like. She died quite young, in her 30s, but she was home. She stayed taking care of their father, I think, at the end of his life, and she settled her father's estate. And what I know from the settlement of the estate is that she was tough. She was knowledgeable and tough, and the tone of the letters is not deferential. It's not modest. It's not submissive. She is writing to these white men who are older and better educated and her father's friends in a way we do not expect African American women to write to people who, a few years earlier, had considered themselves if they didn't still, their enslavers and dominant classes. And what's amazing to me about the letters is not just Sarah Anne Sanders' expression of great confidence and dignity, but that these guys she wrote to, especially this guy Earl Beck, who was a debtor and lawyer of her father, they never seemed to doubt that she had her claims had merit, and that she was in charge of her father's reputation, and he gets reduced to a lot of whining throughout the correspondence. That's quite you know there were, I will admit there are times in the archive when I was reading what were to some people in the story, very painful accounts, and I burst out laughing, because she reduces him to a puddle of insecurity and self defensiveness.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:01  
I want to ask, you got to meet one of the descendants, I believe. Could you talk a little bit about or some of them? Could you talk some about that? 

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  31:11  
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Cordelia Brown, who was then 96 years old, Cordelia Hinkson Brown, who was the several great granddaughter of people in the book. I have since at the same time, pretty much became very friendly with her daughter, Beverly Brown Ruggia, and great niece Elsa Laura, all of whom are incredibly knowledgeable about their family's history and about the process by which they donated the papers to the Library Company, and who speak in very moving ways about the kind of trust that it entails to deposit your family's personal papers in a library, not knowing who's going to look at them, not knowing what interpretation they're going to give to the story. You know it takes an enormous amount of trust to deposit your family's papers in a library, and know that you have no control over what narrative comes out of it. But they are extraordinary now, extraordinarily knowledgeable about their family papers and very attuned to what it means to hand them over. And they keep giving more papers to the Library Company so there will be future books to be written by other people.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:18  
Has this process, the whole process of being a historian, but especially this book, made you rethink what it is of your own life that you saved, the kind of archives that will outlive you at all? 

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  32:33  
No, it's interesting, because me writing this did make me think about it. Okay. I mean, you raised the question about what it was like to meet some of the descendants. And I usually study dead people. And in this book, I study dead people. I'm not used to meeting descendants, partly because I don't want people feeling that they get to approve my work, which I was very clear with the descendants of this family that I was going to write a book that they were not going to be entirely happy about. No one in this book is a saint or a hero. People make decisions and take actions that are really ambiguous at best and that make us unhappy. I'm not committed to writing a happy history. I don't think Americans deserve that, or that really anyone does. But in the past, when I wrote a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I later met some of her descendants were really not happy with my interpretation of her, some of them, because the book argues that throughout her life, not only in the famous comments that she made after the Civil War, in the debate of a whether to support the 15th Amendment that gave Black men but not women, the vote. Throughout her life, and in ways that I think still have an impact on feminism, she was racist and elitist, and when she said women, she meant white women. That's what the images that flashed in her and many people's minds, and I it made me very nervous about meeting these descendants who were much more connected to the papers and had just recently given them, but it was really a pleasure. You know, Mrs. Brown, who was one who was the 96 year old descendant who passed away a few years ago at 100, she was very eager to know that I think Richard Cogdell was nice to Sarah Sanders, to Sarah Martha Sanders. And my answer to that, when people have asked me is, "Why is that the question you want to know the answer to? Why does it matter to us to think that somebody's actions in the past mitigate the horrors of slavery?" I can't really answer that question.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:35  
You talk in the book about not really, necessarily having a place to start and end this story. You know, I think you say at the end something like history demands a story, and that's not, not necessarily what you're always able to tell. Could, could you just reflect a little bit on on that piece of it, on, sort of where, what it is that you as the historian determine about what to tell?

Speaker 1  34:59  
So, as I said earlier, I came at this fairly small story with a very big question about how to recreate the grand narrative of American history. And this story, in many ways, intellectually speaking, blew up my world. It looks like a small story, but it travels across the Atlantic. It travels across almost 200 years. It travels across an enormous range of sources. There are white people in it, there are Black people in it, there are enslaved bi-racial children in it. And it really was hard to torture it into a coherent narrative. And I kept trying to imagine different ways of doing it. Do I do it as vignettes and leave it to the reader to make something coherent out of it? Do I take bits of American history, the Civil War, the Market Revolution, emancipation, and talk about the family in terms of those big moments or big issues. And finally, I decided that what historians do is tell stories in a more or less chronological way. And I was sufficiently disciplined by my discipline that I needed to do that. And I think I have tried to do that, but I spend a certain amount of time looking backward and forward and then frequently reminding the reader, we can't know this. So for instance, I start with this man, John Stevens, who was a white immigrant from England who traveled from England to St. Kitts to Georgia to South Carolina. He's the ancestor whose papers ended up in this family's basement in Philadelphia, and I start with him, but even as I talk about him as one of the origin stories of this family, I have a large section which reminds readers that the other origin story of this family, namely Sarah Martha Sanders' ancestors, we don't know anything. We can surmise that some of them got to South Carolina, probably from the West Indies, but we really don't have a story. We certainly don't have letter books. We don't even have proper slave owners' records to describe her ancestors. And so even when we tell a story, we're missing more pieces than we have. I think I say at one point this book, like every single history book ever written, leaves out far more than it puts in, and that's inevitable. We don't have a quilt that has all the pieces. I mean, I love the name of your podcast, and I'm perfectly happy to contribute to unsung histories, but there's way more in the background that we're not hearing than what it's actually getting recognized by the sources.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:24  
Well, I want to encourage listeners to read this book, because I think it really is, it's an incredible story on its own, but it also really made me think a lot about the things that I think about anyway, but the you know, what do we know? What don't we know, what can't we know? So can you please tell listeners how they can get a copy of the book? 

Speaker 1  37:45  
 Well, they can get a copy of the book from independent booksellers or from Amazon or from directly from the University of North Carolina Press. It is on Kindle, so there's an E version of it, if people want that. The one other thing that I would say about this book is that I would encourage readers to think of history as a collage. Historians have to turn it into a chronological story, but it's really a collage, which means it's got lots of different pieces piled over each other, but it's not incoherent, and that's how I think about this story.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:16  
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?

Speaker 1  38:20  
In my other books, I've made a couple of coherent and I hope, significant arguments that are part of a historical conversation. This book, while it is definitely part of several historical conversations and definitely part of the ongoing conversation happening now in our political life about how history is dangerous and makes people uncomfortable, it doesn't make a single coherent argument in the same way those other books did. Instead, it really invites readers into the process of making American history, and I hope, reminds readers that history is in fact, dangerous.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:58  
Well, that is an excellent place to leave it. So Lori, thank you so much for speaking with me.

Dr. Lori Ginzberg  39:03  
Thank you, Kelly, it was fun.

Teddy  39:25  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @UnsungHistory or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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