The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.16 (812 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B01N4CVYMS |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 361 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-08-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Marcus Rediker (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amis
In this captivating, must-read book, Marcus Rediker shows that Lay’s disfigured body contained a mind of steel and a heart overflowing with compassion for victims of the Atlantic slave trade. If you’re ready to have your mind changed about received wisdom on the eccentric, lonely early abolitionist who blazed the way for later antislavery stalwarts, read this brilliantly researched and passionately written book.”—Gary Nash, author of Warner Mifflin, Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist. “Rediker provides a valuable addition to abolitionist historiographyA concise, solid biography of ‘the first revolutionary abolitionist,’ a diminutive man who was decades ahead of his time.”—Kirkus Reviews“Admirers of Marcus Rediker’s splendid The Slave Ship will be delighted by this historian’s new book. With the
He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labor, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. The little-known story of an eighteenth-century Quaker dwarf who fiercely attacked slavery and imagined a new, more humane way
Malvin said A Revolutionary hero for our times. “The Fearless Benjamin Lay” by Marcus Rediker brilliantly succeeds in resuscitating an obscure but vitally important Revolutionary hero for our time. Professor Rediker is a distinguished historian whose groundbreaking work has proven that revolution in the Americas was driven by struggle from the bottom-up. I believe that anyone searching for an authentic hero of American history should read this excellent book.Professor Rediker demonstrates how Benjamin Lay embodied a vital link between the English Revolution and the American Revolution. Benjamin Lay carried forward the largely forgotten radicalism of the Quak. C. Wong said Amazing Forgotten Man in Quaker History!. William Lay was a most unusual person in history, a self educated man who became an avid reader, only four foot seven inches with a hunchback, a man revolted by the bad treatment of slaves by their owners in Barbardos, a vegetarian and animal rights proponent. I was curious about him because of his Quaker background and that Benjamin Franklin was one of his friends. It is an understatement to say that he was a free thinker.Marcus Rediker produced a very well researched biography of William Lay and must have spent many hours locating illustrations for this fascinating book. It is written in a scholarly manner but the charac