Gregory E. O’Malley
Author of
The Many Escapes of David George (St. Martins Press, 2025)
Greg O’Malley is a historian of slavery, the slave trade, and early America. He is professor and department chair in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, received four awards: The America Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize for British history; the AHA’s Rawley Prize for Atlantic history; The Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association; and the Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. The book examines a brutal network for distributing enslaved Africans throughout North America and the Caribbean after their survival of the Atlantic crossing.
O’Malley is also co-creator (with Alex Borucki) of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, a free online research tool that documents more than 35,000 human trafficking voyages from one port in the Americas to another.
His second book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution, is forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press (February 2026). It offers a life history of a man born enslaved in colonial Virginia, whose attempts to escape bondage resulted in wide-ranging travels, captivities, and re-enslavements, illuminating both enslaved people’s resistance and the powerful barriers to their escape. David George finally found emancipation by fleeing the emerging United States and running to the British Army during the Revolutionary War.
Represented by Luba Ostashevsky
Books by Gregory
The Many Escapes of David George (St. Martins Press, 2025)
Washington Post 6 Noteworthy Books for February
By a prize-winning historian: The dramatic story of a Black man’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America
When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period―a Black man’s quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people.
In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone.
Piecing together archival records and David George’s own brief account of his life―the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America―Gregory O’Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.