This work is the product of ten years of study. It is about the phenomenon of Muslim Slaves in the Chesapeake Bay Region from 1634 until 1865. The book examines fifty-five Muslim slaves in Maryland and another fifty-one in Virginia. It also looks at slave forts and prisons in Africa, the Middle Passage-the route by which West African slaves came to America-slave auction and slave dealers in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia and many other issues related to American slavery in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

This work is the product of ten years of study. It is about the phenomenon of Muslim Slaves in the Chesapeake Bay Region from 1634 until 1865. The book examines fifty-five Muslim slaves in Maryland and another fifty-one in Virginia. It also looks at slave forts and prisons in Africa, the Middle Passage-the route by which West African slaves came to America-slave auction and slave dealers in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia and many other issues related to American slavery in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

Whites who aided black freedom seekers played their part.

“Part historical narrative, part genealogical detective work,” this is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations (Library Journal). Using diaries, court records, legal documents, books, paintings, photographs, and oral histories, From Slave Ship to Harvard traces a family—from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today—forming a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement. Yarrow Mamout was an educated Muslim from Guinea, brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah. When he gained his freedom forty-four years later, he’d become so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC, that he attracted the attention of the eminent portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, who captured Yarrow’s visage in the painting on the cover of this book. Yarrow’s immediate relatives—his sister, niece, wife, and son—were notable in their own right. His son married into the neighboring Turner family, and the farm community in western Maryland called Yarrowsburg was named for Yarrow Mamout’s daughter-in-law, Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow. The Turner line ultimately produced Robert Turner Ford, who graduated from Harvard University in 1927. Just as Peale painted the portrait of Yarrow, James H. Johnston’s new book puts a face on slavery and paints the history of race in Maryland, where relationships between blacks and whites were far more complex than many realize. As this one family’s experience shows, individuals of both races repeatedly stepped forward to lessen divisions, and to move America toward the diverse society of today.

Slaves, convicts, and unfree immigrants have traveled the oceans throughout human history, but the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has narrowed our understanding of modernity. This provocative study contrasts the Atlantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex relationships in the Indian Ocean in the long 19th century.

"On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler from the American frontier, who urgently requested a private "interview" with the President, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the President in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic. Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives reveals the untold story of two escaped West Africans in the American heartland whose Arabic writings reached a sitting U.S. President, prompting him to intervene on their behalf. Recounting a quest for emancipation that crosses borders of race, region and religion, Jeffrey Einboden unearths Arabic manuscripts that circulated among Jefferson and his prominent peers, including a document from 1780s Georgia identified as the earliest surviving example of Muslim slave authorship in the newly-formed United States. Revealing Jefferson's lifelong entanglements with Islam and captivity, Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives tracks the ascent of Arabic slave writings to the highest halls of U.S. power, while questioning why such vital legacies from the American past have been entirely forgotten."--

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.