Unalienable Rights: Liberty, Equality, and the Buried Histories of 1776 presented by Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox

Monday, March 30, 2026
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Allendale Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students

Join us as Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox presents on her recent research "Unalienable Rights: Liberty, Equality, and the Buried Histories of 1776"

Anna-Lisa Cox is an award-winning American historian and Non-Resident research Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her original research underpins two history 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. Cox’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. Her book, A Stronger Kinship, on a rural community in the nineteenth-century Midwest whose founders created a community of racial integration, won the Michigan Notable Book Award. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress Folklife Center to collect oral histories from multi-generational African American farmers across the Midwest. Dr. Cox just completed a four-year project producing the Questioning Conversation educational video series on the history of the underground railroad, for the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. Dr. Cox is currently a judge for the LA Times History Book Awards and is at work on her next book.

Location Information

Pere Marquette Room KC 2204

Download parking map for the Allendale Campus

Contact Information

Questions? email [email protected]

Hosting Department, Organization, or Business

Brooks College Dean's Office

Share this event

This event was added to the calendar by Samantha Rypstra (rypstrsa@gvsu.edu) on Thursday, January 22, 2026 and was last updated on Friday, January 23, 2026 at 8:17 a.m.