A pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker joins us to share his definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins.

As many as 100,000 people emancipated themselves from bondage in the United States through what we have come to call the “Underground Railroad.”  But the metaphor is misleading – very few escaped either underground or by railroad.  Long hidden from history were the thousands who escaped by sea, assisted by sailors, dockworkers, and market women as they sailed as stowaways from Southern to Northern ports where slavery had been abolished. In a deeply researched and grippingly told work of history, Marcus Rediker, a leading scholar of maritime history, shares the stories of these brave men and women who used the docks and ships as avenues to freedom —among them the legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, two of the most important fugitives in a vast Atlantic system of maritime escape. Don’t miss Rediker’s luminous portrait of the American waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation; and his dialogue with Lee Blake, an expert on the history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, long known as the “Fugitive’s Gibraltar.”

Marcus Rediker is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Lee Blake is a public historian and president of the New Bedford Historical Society.  Dr. Blake has received several national, state, and local awards in historic preservation for her work preserving the history and legacy of the Underground Railroad and the Abolition Movement.