Whitewashing the American Frontier: Historians and the Dangerous Myth of a White Midwestern Past

press release: What if the Midwest was once filled with hundreds of African American farms and farmers who had pioneered the Old Northwest frontier long before the Civil War? What if the baseline of the Midwest was diversity, and segregation and racial homogeneity were an artificial and violent construction? And what if this were all true? For years, historians had decided to ignore and erase this past in favor of a myth of the Northwest Territory as a space that was settled only by whites – a myth strengthened by David McCullough’s recent best-seller, The Pioneers.

In this Humanities Without Boundaries talk, Anna-Lisa Cox will discuss the ramifications of these erasures, from the land and from history books, and the ways these erasures are effecting the Midwest and the nation today.

Anna-Lisa Cox is an award-winning historian of race relations in nineteenth-century America. She is a fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and a recent Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where her original research underpinned two exhibits. Cox’s first book, A Stronger Kinship, was awarded the Michigan Notable Book Award and her most 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 eight best history books of 2018. Booklist praised it for providing “a moving and necessary corrective to pioneer history” while Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described it as “a revelation of primary historical research that is written with the beauty and empathic powers of a novel.”