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This event is a Core Conversation at the 2018 Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. See the full Core Conversation lineup here.

Benjamin Lay (1682–1759) was one of the first people to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. The Quaker dwarf lived in a cave not far near Philadelphia, ate only fruits and vegetables, and created a new revolutionary way of life.

Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of a new biography of Lay and he will discuss the book with the Post-Gazette's Tony Norman as part of a broader conversation abut slavery and abolitionism in American history, memory, and contemporary politics.

Marcus Rediker is also Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d'études mondiales / Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. 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. He is, by ancestry, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, and Cherokee; he is, by upbringing, a Southerner; by generation, of the New Left; by choice, a citizen of the world. Rediker has written, edited, or co-written ten books including The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.

Tony Norman is an award-winning Columnist, Associate Editor, and Book Review Editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 2002, he became an adjunct professor of journalism at Chatham University where he continues to teach. In 2005, he won a Knight-Wallace Fellowship and spent a year at the University of Michigan.

A production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and The Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University.