author
Henry Harris Jessup
1832–1910
An American Presbyterian missionary and writer, he spent more than half a century in the eastern Mediterranean and became one of the best-known English-language interpreters of nineteenth-century Syria and Lebanon. His work blends eyewitness history, travel writing, and religious reflection.
1 Audiobook
The Women of the Arabs
by Henry Harris Jessup
About the author
Born in 1832 in New York, Henry Harris Jessup became a Presbyterian minister and missionary, and he is best remembered for his long service in Beirut and the surrounding region. He worked there for decades under the American Board mission and wrote extensively about the people, politics, and religious life of Syria and Lebanon as he knew them.
Jessup was also an educator and public speaker. He helped support Protestant educational work in Beirut and became closely associated with what later developed into the American University of Beirut. His books, including Fifty-Three Years in Syria, made him an important English-language witness to major changes in the Ottoman Arab world during the nineteenth century.
He died in 1910, but his writing still offers a vivid window into missionary life and the history of the region. Readers often come to him both for his personal story and for his detailed, sometimes deeply observant record of a world in transition.