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Anna-Lisa Cox

Anna-Lisa
Cox
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Spring 2009
Title / Appointment: 
Independent Scholar

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R
Telephone: 
617-496-0592
E-Mail: 
annalisa_cox@hotmail.com

Biography Information

Anna-Lisa Cox is an active historian, writer, and lecturer on the history of race relations in the nineteenth-century Midwest.  She received her M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholars Award, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation Fellowship, the Pew Younger Scholars Fellowship and a Spencer Foundation grant.  She is the author of A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith, published by Little, Brown in 2006 and winner of the Michigan Notable Book award.  She was a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library from 2002 to 2006, where she was also the Director of their Rural History Seminar program.  She currently resides in New York City where she is at work on her next book entitled, Founding Freedom -- a history of the free blacks who moved from the South to the Midwestern frontier before the Civil War.

Project Description

Founding Freedom: The Antebellum Free Black Diaspora and the Creation of Communities of Equality on the American Frontier.

 Between 1830 and 1860 over 32,000 African Americans migrated to the Midwestern frontier.  While the underground railroad played an important role in this movement, a surprising percentage of those settlers were free blacks from the agrarian Southeast who had come from communities where their families had lived for over a century.  Having left places of economic stability, these pioneers insisted on creating communities that went beyond their prior circumscribed existence.  Through extraordinary and often illegal efforts they obtained suffrage, political leadership, access to education, and social and religious leadership – often within racially integrated contexts.  While there have been a few regional studies of these communities, there have been no books written on the patterns of this significant African American diaspora.  Moreover, no one has attended to the broader implications inherent in the very acts of creating these communities on the Midwestern frontier, which was then the focus of so much national attention.  Through the study of this diaspora and community formation my project offers a new interpretive framework for understanding concepts of African American leadership, entrepreneurship and resistance in antebellum America.