Marcus Rediker is an award-winning scholar and historian who has researched and written extensively on the previously unexplored accounts of seafaring, piracy and the origins of globalization. His latest book, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking-Penguin, 2007), provides a very intriguing insight into slavery from the maritime perspective, the not-so-well-known and hardly documented accounts of individual slaves, abolitionists and sailors in slave ships and the impact of slavery in modern American life through folk memory and artistic memory. Rediker is also the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), and Villains of All Nations (2005), and teaches maritime history at the University of Pittsburgh.
In this Special Feature written alongside the publication of his book in 2007, Marcus Rediker talks about an unexpected and impacting document he came across during his research for The Slave Ship. His vast knowledge of the subject he talks about is evident from the fact that the article reads as fluid and effortless as a story. Click to read.
