Larrier assembles the record of what nineteenth-century African Americans made of Haiti, drawing on diplomatic memoirs, the black press, emigration tracts, lectures and plays. Freedom's Journal ran twelve articles on Haitian geography and history in 1827; the Colored American later reported on Haitian schooling and trade and faulted the United States for withholding recognition. John Mercer Langston's autobiography records his astonishment at a government staffed and run by black officials. Two waves of emigration, in the 1820s and around 1861, carried settlers who named their colonies after Rochester and New Haven, and many came home. The centrepiece is 1893, when Frederick Douglass spoke at the Haitian pavilion of the Chicago exposition and William Edgar Easton's play about Dessalines was staged the same day. Larrier notes how insistently Douglass and Easton framed Haitian achievement as proof of black manhood, a gendered reading that pushed Haitian women to the edges of the tribute.