Feb. 8, 2018 – Marcus Rediker

A screening of “Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of Rebels” will take place at the State Theatre, on Thursday, February 8, at 8:00 p.m. A Q&A with Marcus Rediker and Tony Buba will follow.

RSVP for your FREE seat HERE

Description: This documentary by Tony Buba is based on Marcus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Viking-Penguin, 2012). It chronicles a trip to Sierra Leone in 2013 to visit the home villages of the people who seized the slave schooner Amistad in 1839, to interview elders about local memory of the case, and to search for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began. The film uses the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery.

Documentary Trailer: 

 


Marcus Rediker earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and is currently Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales / Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris.

He has, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty. He is, by ancestry, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, and Cherokee; he is, by upbringing, a Southerner; by generation, of the New Left; by choice, a citizen of the world.

He has written, co-written, or edited ten books: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987); Who Built America? (1989), volume one; The Many-Headed Hydra (2000, with Peter Linebaugh); Villains of All Nations (2004); The Slave Ship (2007); Many Middle Passages (2007); The Amistad Rebellion (2012); Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution (2013); and Outlaws of the Atlantic (2014). He recently completed The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, published by Beacon Press in September 2017. Learn more about Rediker and his work at marcusrediker.com.

 

Selected books by Marcus Rediker: