Paula Austin is assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento. She lives in Sacramento, California, and has been a member since 2009.
Joshua Wright is an associate professor of history and coordinator for the Social Studies Teacher Education Program at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES). He lives in Salisbury, Maryland, and has been a member since 2009.
Every week, AHA Today showcases a new grant, fellowship, or scholarship of interest to historians which has been posted to our free Calendar. This week we are featuring the Marcus Garvey Memorial Foundation Research Grant.
Phil Rubio is associate professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro. Phil lives in Durham, North Carolina, and has been a member since 2002.
By Ethan Ehrenhaft
In 2009, archaeologists uncovered a small copper medallion in a pit at Fort Shirley, Pennsylvania. Dated to the early 1750s, the trinket may have gone unnoticed were it not for the single phrase in Arabic emblazoned on its surface: “No god but Allah.” Its owner was most likely an enslaved person in the service of trader George Croghan. The Fort Shirley medallion has become part of a rare yet influential assortment of artifacts connected to the lives of enslaved Muslims in the United States.
Cassandra Newby-Alexander is the interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts, professor of history, and director of the Joseph Jenkins Roberts Center for African Diaspora Studies at Norfolk State University. She lives in Chesapeake, Virginia, and has been a member since 2000.
Intertwined. Overlapping. Interconnected. The complicated entanglement of slave trading, geographies, and ethnicities was the focus of the Thursday night plenary, “New Perspectives on Histories of the Slave Trade,” at the 2018 AHA annual meeting. In papers ranging in focus from trade routes in the western Indian Ocean to forced treks across Brazil’s interior to mangrove slave trading ports, the panelists revealed how histories of slave trading offer opportunities to rethink the construction of race and ethnicity from a global perspective, the broader theme of this year’s meeting.
Telisha Dionne Bailey is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Dionne lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has been a member since 2015.
