Not P just Dixon

[Becky Lindroos]

> The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Verso) by Marcus Rediker

Thanks for the heads up, Mark.   Rediker is good -  he’s written rather extensively about the pirates of the 18th century (their brand of democracy) and more recently about slavery.  
He’s an American professor, historian, writer, and activist for a variety of peace and social justice causes -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Rediker

I read Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World “  plus “The Many-Headed Hydra”  -   several years ago and still remember them. 

Becky
https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com

> On Nov 28, 2017, at 11:57 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> At the other end of the human scale is The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Verso) by Marcus Rediker. Lay was an 18th-century British-born progressive who took it on himself to point out to his fellow Quakers in Philadelphia that keeping slaves was hardly in line with the sect’s founding principles of brotherly equality. When arguing didn’t work, Lay staged noisy interventions, and on one occasion even threw a bladder filled with pig’s blood at his “covetous” co-religionists. What made this moral and physical bravery all the more remarkable was that Lay was tiny, no more than 4ft tall. “In his time,” concludes Rediker, “Benjamin may have been the most radical person on the planet.” This, then, is micro-history at its best, a careful concentration on one small man’s activities as a way of testing out the limits of what could be thought, known and felt in the hive-mind of early modern America.

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l