Patriots and Pioneers - Early Michigan and the Revolution

JCMHS Holiday Party! Enjoy a fun-filled evening of celebrations, refreshments, awards and a special presentation by famous historian/author Dr. Anna Lisa-Cox. Dr. Cox is an adjunct member of the History Department and a fellow at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox's presentation will focus on the diverse history of Michigan’s settlement and the Black Revolutionary War patriots who helped settle the state.

Bio: Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox is an award-winning historian of nineteenth-century America, with a special focus on racism on the frontier and rural Midwest. She 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 the summer of 2020. Anna-Lisa’s 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 Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program while completing her next book.