Rediker has also worked on the production of a one-man show based on Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay with playwright Naomi Wallace as well as a documentary on La Amistad with filmmaker Tony Buba.

[10] In a 2018 interview, Rediker said that "It took me many years but I finally realized that the kinds of stories I like to tell, and the books I have written, have his Appalachian storytelling tradition behind them.

[4] Commenting on his time at Vanderbilt, Rediker recalled that he felt out of place due to the university's connections with the Southern elite.

[8] The factory faced extreme racial tension, with Rediker describing supporters of Malcolm X and a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan working alongside him.

[1] Rediker's job motivated him to read books and attend two night school courses on the American and French Revolution.

[11] Rediker was the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair of Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa during the 2019-2020 semester.

[25] In May 2013, Rediker and filmmaker Tony Buba traveled to the home villages of slaves that revolted on the Spanish vessel La Amistad in July 1839.

[10][27][28] During their trip to southern Sierra Leone, Rediker and Buba conducted interviews with village elders and searched for the ruins of the Lomboko slave factory.

A documentary chronicling the journey, Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of Rebels premiered in November 2014 at the Three Rivers Film Festival in Pittsburgh.

[26] The play originated from an idea Rediker and Wallace had for a joint lecture in Berlin, where an actor dressed up as Lay would interrupt the presentation and monologue.

[34] Informed by Marxian economics, Rediker's works explore their respective subjects in systemic terms while emphasizing human class-consciousness and agency.

[10] As a practitioner of people's history, Rediker underlines the ruthlessness of sea captains and the squalor of slave ships in his works on slavery.

[38] In that same introduction, Rediker summarizes that the link between slave ships and social relations shaped the modern world despite their obscure histories.

[12] When researching La Amistad, Rediker sought to explore the cultural backgrounds of those aboard and the Poro society of Sierra Leone to provide perspective behind the planning of the slave revolt.

[44] This metaphor is most prominent in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic co-written with Peter Linebaugh.

Rediker and Linebaugh argue that the classically educated rulers and businessmen of the era compared themselves to Hercules, with his twelve labors being likened to the efforts of organizing and structuring the transatlantic economy.

"[45] Rediker and Linebaugh label oppressed groups such as felons, indentured servants, African slaves, pirates, and religious radicals as some of the many heads of the Hydra.

[46] Though this symbolism indicates cooperation between these various groups, Rediker has also made clear that it can depict the chaos of a disorganized and conflicted Atlantic proletariat.

[47] Rediker coined the term "terracentrism" to describe the tendency of historians to solely concentrate on history that occurs on dry land.

Rediker recounted that "he described to me the moment when he first got an active death warrant, meaning, he was given a slip of paper with his date to die on it.

[12][49] In an interview published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Rediker described slavery as an "African holocaust" and likened slave ships to concentration camps.

[30] Rediker has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.