Lecture on Slave Trade Featuring Award-Winning Pitt History Professor Marcus Rediker to Air Dec. 18 and 19 on C-SPAN 3

PITTSBURGH—Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History, will be featured on American History TV’s Lectures in History series, airing at 8 p.m. and midnight Dec. 18 and 1 p.m. Dec. 19 on C-SPAN 3. Rediker’s lecture on the slave trade and slave ships also will air on C-SPAN radio at 10 p.m. Dec. 18. 

“Professor Rediker was selected for American History TV’s Lectures in History program because of his specialty and publications on the slave trade,” said Luke A. Nichter, coexecutive producer of C-SPAN 3’s American History TV. “Lectures in History is a survey of American history as well as college classrooms across the country. When it came time to featuring a class on the slave trade, Professor Rediker’s was an obvious choice.” 

C-SPAN 3 becomes American History TV from 8 a.m. Saturdays through 8 a.m. Mondays. Producers search key political archives for historic speeches of former presidents and other national leaders. Viewers are taken to campuses across the United States to view classes in American history taught by the nation’s leading professors. Programs also include eyewitness accounts of events that have shaped the nation as well as trips to museums and historic sites. 

Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking Penguin and John Murray, 2007) won the 2008 George Washington Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the C.V. Starr Center at Washington College, and Mount Vernon; the 2008 Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians; and the James A. Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association. The book has been translated into Swedish and is currently being translated into Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese. 

Another of Rediker’s books, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004), is under option with Lions Gate Entertainment and is in development as a television miniseries. Rediker also is at work on The Amistad Rebellion: A Sea Story of Slavery and Freedom, scheduled for publication by Viking Penguin in 2012. 

A scholar of early American and Atlantic history, Rediker joined the University in 1994. Among the courses he teaches are The Global History of Piracy, Colonial America, Atlantic History: 1500-1800, and Africa and the Atlantic. 

Rediker also is the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), which earned the 1988 Merle Curti Award for the best work in American social history and the 1988 John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association for best interdisciplinary work in American Studies; Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, with Herbert G. Gutman and others (Pantheon Books, 1989); and The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, with Peter Linebaugh (Beacon Press, 2000), which won the 2001 International Labor History Book Prize from the International Labor History Association. 

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12/6/10/tmw/lks/jdh