The Richards Civil War Era Center invites you to join us for a conversation with Lori Ginzberg, professor emerita, and Richards Center Predoctoral Fellows Hope McCaffrey and Adam McNeil, on Monday, April 21, 4:00 p.m. at the Palmer Museum of Art, 115 Event Space. (Please note the Palmer Museum of Art is closed on Mondays; therefore, you will not be able to tour the museum or displays.)

The conversation will be followed by a reception in honor of Ginzberg (Palmer Museum, 115 Event Space) where the Bookstore will have copies of her book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History, available for sale.

Please register by emailing RichardsCenter@psu.edu by Tuesday, April 15.

Lori Ginzberg, retired from Penn State in 2022 after teaching in the Departments of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies since 1987. She has long been interested in the ways that ideologies about gender obscure the material and ideological realities of class, how women of different groups express political identities, and how commonsense notions of American life shape, contain, and control radical ideas. Among her previous books are Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2009) and Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (UNC Press 2005). In 2023 and 2024 she was a visiting professor of history at Haverford College.

Ginzberg’s latest book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History (UNC Press 2024), relates an ambitious  historical narrative about the ancestors and descendants of the Sanders family—children of a white Charlestonian and a woman he enslaved—while explicitly challenging readers to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented in the archives, thereby inviting them into the process of American history making itself.

Ginzberg has spoken and written widely about the centennial commemoration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A few examples include “‘All Men and Women are Created Equal:’ The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (National Park Service website) A National Constitution Center conversation on the life and legacy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Ginzberg also appeared in Penn State’s “HumIn focus” film, Who Counts: The Complexities of Democracy in America. More recently she has had the opportunity to speak about Tangled Journeys, including at an author event at the Free Library of Philadelphia and on several podcasts.

Hope McCaffrey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Northwestern University, where she studies the history of gender, race, and politics in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

Adam Xavier McNeil is a doctoral candidate in early African American women’s history at Rutgers University, where he focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black women's history and slavery.