For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa to the New World. Here, award-winning historian Rediker creates a detailed history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism...

"In an engaging and anecdotal social history, Maiden Voyages explores how women's lives were transformed by the Golden Age of ocean liner travel between Europe and North America. During the early twentieth century, transatlantic travel was the province of the great ocean liners. It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women, whose lives were transformed by their journeys between the Old World and the New. Some travelled for leisure, some...

In 1941, Eric DeHaan, the captain of the Noordendam, a Dutch tramp freighter, is recruited by the Dutch Naval Intelligence Section for dangerous secret missions that take the ship and its crew behind enemy lines in Europe and North Africa.

"Charles Lenox, Member of Parliament, sets sail on a clandestine mission for the government. When an officer is savagely murdered, however, Lenox is drawn toward his old profession, determined to capture another killer. 1873 is a perilous time in the relationship between France and England. When a string of English spies is found dead on French soil, the threat of all-out war prompts government officials to ask Charles Lenox to visit the newly-dug...

Based on the true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, which was the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.

Square-riggers are usually perceived as vessels of the nineteenth century or earlier. Yet these graceful, muli-masted beauties actually sailed on into the 1950s before they disappeared from the seas forever.

Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery, but it sent an unusually large concentration of sea captains to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences of one extraordinary family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the U-boats bearing down on the...