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Marcus Rediker
University of Pittsburg
Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below” have won numerous awards, including the
George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into eighteen languages worldwide. He is co-author, with Peter Linebaugh, of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000) and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007). He
produced a prize-winning documentary film, Ghosts of Amistad, (2014) directed by Tony Buba. He is currently writing a book about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America, of which this lecture is a part.
Talk Information:
The Making of a Transatlantic Abolitionist: William P. Powell and the Struggle Against Slavery at Sea
October 27, 2023 | 9:00 AM
This lecture explores a neglected topic in the histories of slavery and abolitionism: how enslaved people in the
Southern United States escaped by sea and more generally how the waterfront was a zone of struggle over slavery from the 1830s to the outbreak of the American Civil War. The focus of the lecture is Black sailor-abolitionist William P. Powell, who organized sailors and assisted fugitives in New Bedford, New York, and Liverpool. Powell used maritime working-class connections to unleash a powerful, though little
understood, force of abolitionism "from below."