“Masterly.”—Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the "floating dungeons" at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.

Reproduction of the original.

Myths and stereotypes surrounding seafarers in the Age of Sail persist to this day. Sailors were celebrated for their courage, strength, and skill, yet condemned for militancy, vice, and fecklessness. As sail gave way to steam, sailing-ship mariners became nostalgic symbols of maritime prowess and heritage, representing a timeless, heroic masculinity in an era when the modernizing industrial world was challenging assumptions about gender, class, work, and society. Drawing on British seafaring memoirs from the late nineteenth century, Making Men in the Age of Sail argues that maritime writing moulded the reading public’s image of the merchant seaman. Authors chronicled their lives as they grew from boy sailors to trained seafarers, telling colourful tales of the men they worked with – most never doubted that the sailing ship had made them better men. Their testimony reinforced and preserved conservative perspectives on seafaring manhood as Britain’s economic and technological priorities continued to evolve in the new steamship age. Offering a gender analysis of the image of the seafarer, Making Men in the Age of Sail brings the history of British sailors into wider debates about modernity and masculinity.

Frederick T. Wilson was an engineer who carried the rank of first-class petty officer and served in one of the US Navy's first modern battleships, the USS Oregon. He also participated in the relief of Peking during the Boxer rebellion. This is an uncensored picture of enlisted life.

In October 1735, James Oglethorpe’s Georgia Expedition set sail from London, bound for Georgia. Two hundred and twenty-seven passengers boarded two merchant ships accompanied by a British naval vessel and began a transformative voyage across the Atlantic that would last nearly five months. Chronicling their passage in journals, letters, and other accounts, the migrants described the challenges of physical confinement, the experiences of living closely with people from different regions, religions, and classes, and the multi-faceted character of the ocean itself. Using their specific journey as his narrative arc, Stephen Berry’s A Path in the Mighty Waters tells the broader and hereto underexplored story of how people experienced their crossings to the New World in the eighteenth-century. During this time, hundreds of thousands of Europeans – mainly Irish and German – crossed the Atlantic as part of their martial, mercantile, political, or religious calling. Histories of these migrations, however, have often erased the ocean itself, giving priority to activities performed on solid ground. Reframing these histories, Berry shows how the ocean was more than a backdrop for human events; it actively shaped historical experiences by furnishing a dissociative break from normal patterns of life and a formative stage in travelers’ processes of collective identification. Shipboard life, serving as a profound conversion experience for travelers, both spiritually and culturally, resembled the conditions of a frontier or border zone where the chaos of pure possibility encountered an inner need for stability and continuity, producing permutations on existing beliefs. Drawing on an impressive array of archival collections, Berry’s vivid and rich account reveals the crucial role the Atlantic played in history and how it has lingered in American memory as a defining experience.