Marcus Rediker was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1951, to Buford and Faye Rediker, the first of their two sons. He comes from a working class family, with roots in the mines and factories of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia; he grew up in Nashville and Richmond. Rediker attended Vanderbilt University, dropped out of school and worked in a factory for three years, and graduated with a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976. He later went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in history. Rediker taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and is currently Professor and Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty. Rediker have written (or co-written) five books: *Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea* (1987), *Who Built America?* (1989), volume one; *The Many-Headed Hydra* (2000), *Villains of All Nations* (2004) and *The Slave Ship: A Human History* (2007). He has lectured throughout the United States and abroad, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Moscow, Sydney, and Tokyo; as well as had his writings translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish; and to hold fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation.