The Slave Ship

Just finished The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker. One of the more interesting things I learned from reading this book was about myself: I learned that I've had kind of a grammar-school conceptualization of the Atlantic slave trade, and that has not been serving me well in terms of putting that shameful part of the world's history in its proper perspective. I've long known that history is first and foremost a product of whoever writes it (Churchill had a particularly good grasp of this idea), and it follows that the history books we use to educate our children have their particular points of view and biases, and that these in turn can (and do) abuse what might otherwise be a fairly accurate account of what actually happened in the past. Of course, as a historian, Dr. Rediker has his own take on this story, and he is a self-proclaimed activist, but his scholarship here is strong and convincing. I think this book is well worth reading, and I hope you'll read it.

Dr. Rediker won the George Washington Book Prize for The Slave Ship. This prize is given to honor the "most important new book about America's founding era."