Fatton's earlier book, Haiti's Predatory Republic, traced the brief ascendancy and subsequent crisis of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas movement after the Duvalier dictatorship fell in 1986. Here he digs further down, into the social origins of Haitian despotism.

The question is why the country has been ruled, almost from its inception, by a succession of dictatorial regimes lording over an exploited majority. Fatton's answer turns on habitus: an intricate repertoire of practices, attitudes, and behavior grounded in the material foundation of the society that produces it.

Hall describes an exchange of knowledge in colonial Louisiana. Africans showed Native people how to fight against Spanish and French methods of warfare; Native people in turn guided Africans into the forests and swamps, where communities of the escaped took hold.

That mixing left descendants. White families with long roots in Louisiana frequently have African and Native American ancestors, though after a few generations the connection was seldom acknowledged, least of all on the African side.

On the question of Haitian influence Hall is careful. Enslaved people in Louisiana who organized against slavery during the Age of Revolutions drew some inspiration from Haiti's success and from the instability of the period, but no evidence ties Haitians directly to any Louisiana conspiracy or revolt. What Haiti did send was people: refugees whose arrival doubled the free population of color in New Orleans.

Middlekauff begins his account of the American Revolution well before the imperial quarrel, with the war that made it possible. Pitt's decision to commit Britain's strength to North America while France was pinned down in Europe produced Louisbourg, Quebec and the end of French power on the continent, and with it an empire far larger and far more expensive to hold.

The colonies he then describes are neither uniformly prosperous nor socially flat. Merchant fortunes and intermarried families concentrated at the top; Hudson Valley manors carried feudal-sounding privileges their holders rarely exercised; the share of taxable wealth held by the richest few in Boston and Philadelphia climbed across the century while the urban poor went hungry and rioted for bread to little effect.

Out of that setting come the measures that broke the peace, starting with Grenville's molasses duty and a customs service that had never managed to collect much of anything.

Fick sets the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804 inside the Age of Revolution's arguments about rights and citizenship, and finds that those who made it had to build the meaning of freedom step by step. Nothing came ready-made. Each definition took shape hemmed in by colonial conditions, by war between empires, and by politics that would not hold still in either revolution.

The article follows emancipation and citizenship first as French officials applied them from 1793 to 1798, then under Toussaint Louverture between 1798 and 1802. In both phases rights came sorted by category of person, and the great mass of plantation labourers never entered the nation's civic or political life at all. Their exclusion long outlasted independence.

Fick names the paradox: collective freedom from slavery survived Atlantic war and empire only through forced labour, militarization, and individual rights withheld from the people working the land.

Only in Saint-Domingue, Fick argues, was the natural-rights language of 1776 and 1789 carried through to its conclusion, since only there was slavery itself destroyed rather than invoked as a figure of speech. The insurgents exposed contradictions in Enlightenment thought that neither of the other revolutions had to confront.

Most of the essay follows what became of that freedom. Emancipation held, but Toussaint tied cultivators to the estates through a militarized agricultural code, blocked land sales below fifty carreaux so that no class of smallholders could form, and required passports of anyone not working a plantation. The constitution of 1801 wrote the arrangement into fundamental law. Dessalines carried the logic further, sorting every citizen into laborer or soldier and declaring all Haitians black, a formula Fick treats as legal fiction laid over an unhealed split between anciens and nouveaux libres.

Independence made abolition permanent at the price of a state whose agrarian majority stayed outside politics.

Mothering in rural Haiti is the subject here, examined through the lakou — at once a cluster of houses and the extended, multigenerational family form that occupies it, long a prominent feature of Haitian life.

Edmond, Randolph, and Richard work in the province of Léogâne, using a cultural-ecological framework and a descriptive, exploratory design to look at how mothers are sustained by family support. They note what the lakou originally rested on: members worked together and provided for one another, financially and otherwise.

Garrigus begins with a puzzle. Across the eighteenth-century Americas, wealthy planters of African descent were rare, and where they existed — Jamaica, Brazil — money and connections could buy a working version of white status. Saint-Domingue had the largest such class anywhere and refused it that recognition. Julien Raimond, an indigo planter, would have counted as white almost anywhere else.

The explanation offered here runs through the Seven Years' War. Defeat in 1763 brought imperial restructuring and colonial resentment, and island-born whites answered by insisting on their Frenchness. Colonists and administrators together built a public sphere organised around a shared white identity, and borrowed Enlightenment claims about biology and gender to cast free people of colour as corrupt, effeminate and unfit for civic life — a line that also soothed the envy poorer European arrivals felt toward wealthy mixed-race neighbours.

Those families replied with liberal and patriotic argument, and after 1789 with a rival account of colonial society.

Bellhouse tracks a change in how race was made visible in French metropolitan culture across the long eighteenth century, working through two figures she takes to be symbolically central: the dismembered enslaved Black man, and the Black rapist or lover who is duly punished.

The evidence is two sets of illustrations for Voltaire's Candide, both designed by Moreau le Jeune, one from 1787 and one from 1803. The French and Haitian Revolutions fall between them, and reading the pair against each other registers what had shifted in the French cultural imaginary.

The asymmetry she identifies is telling. Images of the maimed enslaved man circulated openly in France across the whole period, while sex between the races stayed off limits to representation. In 1803, a year before Haitian independence was declared, Moreau breaks that prohibition by metaphor, substituting a monkey to render the Black man as a beast committing rape.

Why did French colonial builders in different corners of the New World arrive at different kinds of houses? Edwards puts that question to three settlement zones: Saint Domingue in the Caribbean, the Illinois Country of upper Louisiana, and Louisiana's lower reaches.

The method is to treat propositions drawn from culture theory as claims to be tested rather than assumed. Founder's effect, syncretism between cultures, and preadaptation are each weighed against what is documented about how vernacular traditions formed and how the ordinary settler's house changed shape over time.

At issue throughout is how far such broad cultural processes account for the variation.

Laguerre argues that migrant politics has been misfiled. Examined from inside the receiving country it looks like ethnic politics or voting behaviour; examined from the homeland it looks marginal, a shadow of real government. Neither framing captures what is happening.

He proposes diasporic politics as an arena in its own right, transnational rather than domestic or international, and without the legal foundation that gives states their legitimacy. It works by grafting itself onto institutions at both ends, party organizations where migrants live and electoral machinery where they came from, while building nonprofit structures of its own, so that a foothold in one place becomes leverage in the other.

Because it crosses borders by definition, he insists it be theorized through globalization rather than international relations, and he traces how homeland governments come to count on remittances while host states seek integration. Haitian settlements in the United States, Canada and France supply the recurring examples.

Lundy tracks the arrival of Saint Domingue refugees in Philadelphia, from the fifteen who stepped off the Charming Sally in May 1791 to the roughly three thousand who followed over the next thirty months, asking why this city in particular drew them.

The city was free, the state around it was free, and it held both the young republic's capital and a centre of antislavery organizing, with gradual abolition acts promising freedom after six months to anyone a settling owner brought in. That made the landing of enslaved refugees awkward. Awkwardness turned to alarm: a run of arsons, a growing black population and the news from the island produced open talk of imported insurrection, and in 1798 the governor barred further such landings.

Among black Philadelphians the meaning ran the other way. Independence in 1804 became a source of pride, an argument against colonization schemes, and eventually the basis of an emigration society.

Arguments about women's power in Africa often turn on how much of a senior woman's authority was symbolic and how much was real. Thornton takes the Kingdom of Kongo as his test case.

Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, elite Kongo women exercised power at one remove, working through the male relatives they could influence. That shifted once civil war broke out after 1665: women began to hold power overtly, running sections of the country with less reliance on male intermediaries.

The limit held at the top. Unlike their counterparts in Ndongo and Matamba, Kongo women never took control of the state itself.

The revolutions that remade the Atlantic between 1776 and 1825 are best read as a chain, Blackburn argues, each radicalizing the next — and the Haitian link is the one habitually dropped. R. R. Palmer's celebrated survey of the democratic revolutions passed over Saint-Domingue entirely, an omission that flattered the others by removing the episode in which emancipatory and reactionary forces collided hardest.

Neither the French assembly nor its successor moved against slavery on its own initiative; the first real breach came from Jacobins acting under pressure from slave revolt and British invasion. Blackburn holds British and French leaders responsible for the bloodshed that attended their attempts to restore the plantation regime, and notes what the Haitian constitutions did afterwards: offering asylum to Africans and their descendants, renouncing war on neighbours, and grounding citizenship in a state too weak to trouble the peasantry much.

Pezzullo takes up the stretch of the early 1990s when Haiti sat near the center of international attention. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest, won the presidency and was pushed out by the military within a year, and before long thousands of impoverished Haitians were reaching Florida in improvised boats.

The account turns on Washington's response. Restoring Aristide became a stated priority of the incoming Clinton administration in early 1993; by that autumn, backers of the ruling junta had succeeded in facing down the United States over the arrival of the USS Harlan County and the UN peacekeepers it carried.

Everitt's reference work runs alphabetically through the working vocabulary of statistics, from actuarial estimators and adaptive sampling designs to added variable plots and onward. Entries are short by design: a plain definition, the defining formula where one is needed, and a bracketed pointer to a journal paper or textbook for readers who want to go further.

Terms in bold thread related headwords together, so that a narrow entry simply redirects to the broader method it belongs to, and figures illustrate the graphical procedures. Alongside core theory - probability rules, clustering models, distributional tests - the dictionary gives generous room to applied fields, especially medical and biological research: clinical trial design, survival analysis, genetic variance, sampling for ecological surveys. Commercial software and teaching packages get headwords of their own.

The result is a lookup tool rather than a textbook, built for a reader who has met an unfamiliar term and wants it explained in a paragraph.

The opening volume of a collaborative history, carrying the story from Christian beginnings to Constantine through commissioned essays grouped in sections. The first of these confronts how hard it is to separate Jewish from Gentile Christianity, singles out the Johannine writings for their distinctive reading of the Jesus tradition, and closes on the shared ethos, organization and ritual that gave scattered groups a family likeness.

Later sections follow the making of Christian identity through writing and dispute — the early emergence of a literary culture, Marcion and his opponents, self-definition against Judaism and against Graeco-Roman philosophy — before breaking the picture down region by region, from Asia Minor and Egypt to Syria, Gaul, North Africa and Rome.

Those regional chapters answer a shift in scholarship: away from any assumed original uniformity, toward local variety in doctrine and practice, while declining Bauer's thesis that Rome imposed conformity.

The editors open by drawing the map. By the mid-seventeenth century Europe's confessional geography had settled into a pattern that would hold for centuries: Catholic in the south and west, Protestant across the north and the Baltic, and through south-central Germany, Hungary and Transylvania a jostling mixture of Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, smaller Protestant groups and Jews, with Orthodoxy dominant further east.

Beyond Europe the picture was uneven. Conversion had gone deep in Spanish and Portuguese America and barely at all in the north; in Africa, Christian communities clung on along the Congo and Angola coasts and the lower Zambezi; Goa served as a base for missions across southern India and Ceylon.

Three themes then organise the volume — Enlightenment, reawakening and revolution — and the editors insist they be read together rather than in turn, since each provoked and reshaped the others throughout the period.

Suny's volume covers the Russian twentieth century both chronologically and thematically, setting rival interpretations alongside each other so that readers can weigh the controversies themselves. It is not a history of ethnic Russians alone: the subject is two multinational states, tsarist and Soviet, together with the post-Soviet republics, on the conviction that the story is incomplete without the empire's non-Russian peoples.

The introduction doubles as a history of the field. The totalitarian model that governed early Cold War scholarship gave way in the 1960s and 1970s, when archives opened and social historians recast October as something other than a conspiracy and questioned how completely the Stalinist state controlled society. Work of the detente years read the system through modernization and expected liberalization; Gorbachev's failure brought more fatalistic readings back.

Its recurring themes are the strain between nation and empire, the alternation of reform and revolution, state-building and state collapse, and modernity.

Dupuy traces Haiti's contested path toward democracy through the rise and collapse of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Carried into office in 1991 by the poor majority demanding a more equal and participatory society, the priest turned president lasted seven months before the military removed him. Popular resistance to the junta pushed the United States into leading a multinational force that returned him to power in 1994 for the balance of his term, ending in 1996.

By his re-election in 2000 he was a changed figure, expelled from the priesthood, no longer preaching liberation theology, and bent on consolidating power for himself and Lavalas while leaving intact the predatory state he had promised to dismantle. Armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian methods kept him in place until foreign-backed opponents drove him out in 2004, this time without the population rising to defend him.

Dupuy sets the crisis inside the relations of power binding a poor peripheral country to the core capitalist states.

Michel writes against a long habit of describing Haitian religion as sorcery, fetishism or blood magic, and sets out to restate what Vodou actually holds. Her emphasis falls on its humanism, its sense of community, and the way its ethical content passes between generations without a book, a clergy or a creed.

Vodou, on this account, is less a set of doctrines than a way of organising the whole of life. It offers few absolutes, yet those who serve the spirits prize balance, justice, patience, forgiveness and respect for elders much as members of the scriptural religions do, and they see no contradiction between that service and being good Catholics.

Drawing on Bellegarde-Smith, Courlander, Karen McCarthy Brown and others, Michel presents the religion as African in origin and Creole in formation, pushing up from below rather than imposed from above, and functioning as a practical resource for people living with scarcity and repression.