| "What would the world look like had the levelers, the diggers, the ranters, the slaves, the castaways, the
Maroons, the Gypsies, the Indians, the Amazons, the Anabaptists, the pirates . . . won? Peter Linebaugh
and Marcus Rediker show us what could have been by exhuming the revolutionary dreams and rebellious
actions of the first modern proletariat, whose stories - until now - were lost at sea. They have recovered a
sunken treasure chest of history and historical possibility and spun these lost gems into a swashbuckling
narrative full of labor, love, imagination, and startling beauty."
|
|
- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo'
Mama's Disfunktional!
|
| "The Many-Headed Hydra is about connections others have denied, ignored, or underemployed. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together to create a new
economy and a new class of working people. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker tell their story with deep
sympathy and profound insight. . . . A work of restoration and celebration of a world too long hidden from
view." |
|
- Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America
|
| "For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and
cultivated will be profoundly challenged." |
|
- David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker
|
| "More than just a vivid illustration of the gains
involved in thinking beyond the boundaries between nation-states. Here, in
incendiary form, are essential elements for a people's history of our
dynamic, transcultural
present." |
|
- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic
|
| "A landmark in the development of an Atlantic perspective on early American history. Ranging from
Europe to Africa to the Caribbean and North America, it makes us think in new ways about the role of
working people in the making of the modern world." |
|
- Eric Foner, author of The Story of American
Freedom
|
| "This is a marvelous book. Linebaugh and Rediker have done an extraordinary job of research into buried
episodes and forgotten writings to recapture, with eloquence and literary flair, the lost history of resistance
to capitalist conquest on both sides of the Atlantic." |
|
- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the
United States
|
Links to other reviews of The Many-Headed Hydra:
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