Education
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976 and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in history.
(A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion i...)
A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, now updated with a new epilogue—from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This edition includes a new epilogue about the author's trip to Sierra Leona to search for Lomboko, the slave-trading factory where the Amistad Africans were incarcerated, and other relics and connections to the Amistad rebellion, especially living local memory of the uprising and the people who made it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014312398X/?tag=2022091-20
(Villains of All Nations explores the 'Golden Age' of Atla...)
Villains of All Nations explores the 'Golden Age' of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates. Rediker introduces us to the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger; swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard; and the unnamed, unlimbed pirate who was likely Robert Louis Stevenson's model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. This history shows from the bottom up how sailors emerged from deadly working conditions on merchant and naval ships, turned pirate, and created a starkly different reality aboard their own ships, electing their officers, dividing their booty equitably, and maintaining a multinational social order. The real lives of this motley crew-which included cross-dressing women, people of color, and the'outcasts of all nations'-are far more compelling than contemporary myth. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807050253/?tag=2022091-20
(“Masterly.”—Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Revi...)
“Masterly.”—Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the "floating dungeons" at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143114255/?tag=2022091-20
(Pirates have long been stock figures in popular culture, ...)
Pirates have long been stock figures in popular culture, from Treasure Island to the more recent antics of Jack Sparrow. Villains of all Nations rediscovers their radical democratic challenge to the established powers of the day.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FDV4KD4/?tag=2022091-20
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976 and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in history.
He taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-1985), and is currently Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. My main intention has been to study the collective self-activity of maritime workers. I have therefore given special attention to the efforts made by seafaring workers to free themselves from harsh conditions and exploitation.
Seamen devised various tactics of resistance and forms of self-organization.
Needless to say, such tactics and innovations have rarely been studied in the older maritime historiography. Rediker"s approach can yield surprising discoveries and perspectives--like the egalitarianism of some pirate crews.
"Pirates used the precapitalist share system to apportion their take," he argues in Villains of All Nations: By expropriating a merchant ship (after a mutiny or a capture), pirates seized the means of maritime production and declared it to be the common property of those who did its work. They abolished the wage relation central to the process of capitalist accumulation.
So rather than work for wages using the tools and machine (the ship) owned by a merchant capitalist, pirates commanded the ship as their own property and shared equally in the risks of their common adventure.
His most recent scholarship has turned to the related topics of the transatlantic slave trade and slave uprisings.
(A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion i...)
(Villains of All Nations explores the 'Golden Age' of Atla...)
(Pirates have long been stock figures in popular culture, ...)
(“Masterly.”—Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Revi...)