By Author, Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox
Anna-Lisa Cox is an award-winning historian of nineteenth-century America whose studies have focused on race relations of the frontier and rural Midwest. Her 2006 book, A Stronger Kinship, documents the history of Covert, Michigan and the policies of inclusion and equality that helped to form it. If you would like a signed copy of her book, please purchase it on Amazon in advance and bring it to the program.
Dr. Cox is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her original research underpins two exhibits at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture while her writing has been featured in a variety of publications including The Washington Post and The New York Times. The blog entry she co-wrote on racial massacres in the antebellum North for the Smithsonian’s NMAH blog went viral in the summer of 2020. Her recent book The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality was honored by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best history books of 2018. She just completed a major project for the Library of Congress Folklife Center collecting oral histories from multi-generational African American farmers in the Midwest. She is currently directing the Questioning Conversation video series for the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program while completing her next book.
