Most of those who made the revolution in Saint-Domingue left no writing of their own, and what survives of them comes from hostile witnesses with reasons to shape the record. Toussaint Louverture is the exception. Dubois works by reading such sources against the grain, and presents the result as provisional, a story that invites retelling rather than closing the question.

He is wary of two habits. One treats the revolution's violence as a puzzle of blame, asking who committed atrocities first instead of setting political violence in the context every revolution provides. The other lets racial labels explain what they only describe: he abandons the term mulatto for gens de couleur, and insists that shifting political projects, not colour or class, account for how people acted.

The consequences were worldwide. A society that granted freedom and citizenship across colour lines helped destroy slavery in the Americas and left later struggles a foundation.

Thirteen essays gathered by Bellegarde-Smith treat the African-derived faiths of the Americas as more than matters of belief. They are read here as a means by which people under European domination held their ground, and kept on holding it.

The writers assembled for the volume—among them Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Ina Johanna Fandrich and Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and others—work in different academic fields, come from several countries, and stand largely apart from the scholarly lineage of the West. Their methods differ just as widely, ranging from archival study and fieldwork to interviews and, in some cases, reflection on their own spiritual lives.

What binds the essays is a shared claim about continuity. Ancestral practice, on this account, neither survived intact nor disappeared; it crossed the ocean in pieces, and those pieces were rewoven into creolized ritual, into systems of symbol, and into the sense a community has of who it is.

Kennedy opens on Armistice Day 1918 with four men: Hitler brooding in Pomerania, Churchill at a London window waiting for Big Ben to strike eleven, Stalin ordering night executions from a barge on the Volga at Tsaritsyn, Roosevelt woken in Washington by car horns and regretting that he had spent the war behind a desk. Each had been formed by that war, each would come to rule a country, and each of those countries would be torn apart by what the fighting left unsettled and by its resumption.

The device sets the book's span: the unfinished business of 1918, the American 1920s, the crash, the Depression and the New Deal, and the second war. Kennedy looks hard at the economy beneath the decade's prosperous reputation -- industrial unemployment above ten percent during the Coolidge years, war debt eating a third of the federal budget, workers whom the Lynds found living with no prospect of advancement.

French writing about slavery revived in the 1820s after two decades of censorship, and Charles X's recognition of Haitian independence in 1825 gave it a subject. Kadish notes what recognition cost, an indemnity that drained the Haitian treasury for most of a century, but her interest is in how French readers were taught to feel about it.

Her example is Sophie Doin, a Protestant writer with no personal tie to the Caribbean who set out to do in France what abolitionists had managed in England, namely reach past an elite readership. Doin drew on Thomas Clarkson and on Mungo Park's travels, and Kadish tracks how the French translations she worked from sharpened those originals into something more accusatory.

What Doin added was voice. Figures who appear in her sources only as victims become characters with wills of their own, and women turn up as agents of the cause rather than its emblems.

Three books on Haiti come under review together here: David P. Geggus's Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Elizabeth McAlister's Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, and Herbert Gold's Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth.

The record for this piece names the works Prou takes up but not the judgments he reaches about them, so no account of his assessments is given here.

Valdman begins with a novelist's attempt to render the Creole spoken on the northern plain around 1800 and shows that what reaches the page is essentially today's standard language in antique spelling. The gap can be measured, because a handful of colonial sources survive: travellers' transcriptions, the song Lisette quitte la plaine in two versions, official proclamations, and a planter's guide with dialogues and a glossary.

Possession is the clearest marker. Saint-Domingue Creole regularly linked noun and pronoun with an intervening a, a construction still heard in the north of Haiti but absent from the Port-au-Prince standard. Northern speech also keeps final r and front rounded vowels, holding on to forms the standard has shed.

Other differences are harder to place, notably the loss of a distinct subject pronoun. Valdman doubts the claim that field labourers preserved African languages or spoke a separate gros creole, while conceding the written record cannot settle it.

In 1802 Napoleon sent a large expeditionary force under Leclerc to Saint-Domingue with orders to restore French authority over the colony. Girard follows that campaign through to its failure the following year.

He reads it against the pattern of France's other revolutionary wars, in which conviction and capable command compensated for scarce equipment and untrained troops, while a great European power fought to put the order of the Ancien Régime back in place. The uncomfortable question is which side of that arrangement France now occupied.

Girard sets out to explain why the richest colony of the eighteenth-century Caribbean became the poorest country in the Americas, and settles on three causes.

The first is racial conflict, traced from the disappearance of the indigenous population through slavery and a war of independence in which both sides contemplated extermination, and onward into the rivalry between a small lighter-skinned minority and the Black majority, the colour politics of leaders who claim authenticity by it, and Haiti's dealings with France, the United States and its neighbour to the east.

The second is a ruling class he describes as predatory and self-enriching, leaving roads, schools and clinics to foreign aid and NGOs while the security forces prey on citizens.

The third, which he treats as genuinely contested, is foreign responsibility. Girard rejects the argument from colonial legacy, noting that other sugar colonies were exploited comparably and fared differently.

Moreau de Saint-Mery, jurist and chronicler of French Saint-Domingue, built an elaborate scheme for sorting the colony's population by ancestry. Garraway reads that scheme as a story about families and about sex.

Set out in tables, the gradations of mixed descent carry a sexual allegory, and Garraway argues that what presents itself as natural science is closer to wish fulfilment on the part of white colonists whose own libertinism was unsettling the colony's demographic arithmetic.

Enlightenment writers had held that racial mixture led to degeneration and infertility. Moreau reworks those assumptions into something new: an account of how colonial humanity might biologically reproduce itself, with white men holding the controls. The classification system, on this reading, describes less the society Moreau lived in than a fantasy about who would be permitted to make it.

Sepinwall opens with the interests that drew her into her subject: gender, Jewish history, colonial rule and what came after it, together with questions about what makes revolutions break out, how claims to religious truth operate in politics and culture, and what happens to ideas as they spread through a society. Studying with Keith Michael Baker, a noted specialist in eighteenth-century France, settled her choice of field.

The chapter then turns to the abbe Henri Gregoire, a white French priest whose career is hard to avoid for anyone working on the French Revolution or on modern Jewish history. In 1788 Gregoire published a well-known essay arguing that Jews should be "regenerated" physically, morally and politically so that they could take a full place in French society. He arrived in Paris the following year for the Estates-General, joined the Revolution, and is remembered as the figure who brought about Jewish emancipation.

Rey combines archival history with fieldwork at two northern shrines, Saint James the Greater as Ogou Feray at Plaine-du-Nord and Saint Philomena as Lasyrenn at Bord-de-Mer-de-Limonade, to ask where Haiti's pilgrimage tradition comes from.

Pilgrimage, he notes, is the communal rite with the widest following in the paired cults of Catholic saints and Vodou lwa, and the major feasts cluster in a single summer season. Tracing ritual forms, processions and devotional idioms back through the colonial period, he argues that they draw heavily on Kongolese religious culture, both its older strand and the Catholicism Kongo had already absorbed before the Atlantic crossing.

That claim cuts against a scholarly habit of reading Vodou primarily through West African sources. On Rey's evidence, Central Africa shaped the pilgrimage complex more decisively than the literature on the religion has allowed, and syncretism in Haiti has a longer prehistory than the plantation.

A narrative history running from Columbus to the mid-1990s, first written to carry the story as far as François Duvalier's death in 1971 and extended here to the return of American forces alongside Aristide in 1994. The authors present it as a corrective to the Haitian chronicles they judge poorly documented — Madiou, Ardouin, Léger, Bellegarde — and restrict themselves to what credible sources will support, noting how much has been lost: the palace explosion of 1869, ministry fires, and the archives destroyed during the bloody week of 1883.

Their introduction describes a country of two interlocking worlds, an urban, literate, French-speaking, largely Catholic minority against a rural, Creole-speaking, Vodou-practising majority, while conceding the correlations are approximate. It dwells at length on what the authors take to be an exceptional violence in the Haitian past, on Rotberg's account of paranoia among peasants and elite alike, and on what they call national incompetence.

Lang surveys writing in Haitian Kreyol from its disputed beginnings onward. How the language first formed is still argued over by linguists, but its role is not in doubt: it was the medium through which revolts of the enslaved were organized, and the ground on which Haitian culture was laid.

Substantial literary texts exist by the close of the nineteenth century, among them Oswald Durand's "Choucoune" and Georges Sylvain's Cric? Crac! In the 1930s and 1940s, advocates fought to have Kreyol recognized as the national language and given a standard spelling — a fight not settled until the IPN orthography became official in the 1980s.

Poetry in Kreyol had already revived from the 1950s, led by Feliks Moriso-Lewa, and at least two later generations of writers have followed him. In Franketyen, Lang argues, the language possesses one of the most compelling writers at work in world literature today.

Dupuy treats the revolution of 1791 to 1804 as the most radical of the eighteenth century and the first to insist that Enlightenment claims about human equality applied to everyone rather than only to Europeans. But the colony that produced it was stratified by class as much as by color, and that is where his analysis settles.

Saint-Domingue's property-owning middle contained whites and affranchis alike; free people of color held perhaps a third of the productive estates and a quarter of the enslaved by 1791, while the petits blancs who despised them opposed the great planters. Out of the war came a fresh contest between an emerging black officer class and the older mulatto proprietors.

Louverture and Dessalines, Dupuy argues, defended the same underlying interest, a landed class built on the seized plantations and a bound workforce. Their quarrel was over France, and Louverture's non-racial settlement was ahead of what 1802 could accommodate.

Girard centers his account on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political career, the calculations he made, the concessions he accepted, and the long negotiation he conducted with the Clinton administration. Rather than place one leader in the right, Girard weighs what each man needed and the moral claims each pressed against the other.

The method gives both sides substance. Aristide and Clinton appear with their constituencies behind them, and the bargaining between them reads as consequential rather than procedural. At the book's core sit the confrontation itself and the foreign-policy machinery running between Haiti and the United States.

Around that core Girard also sketches Haiti as it stood at the time of writing, setting out with unusual clarity the tensions that built toward the violence of recent years and Aristide's removal from office.

Online forums look like an obvious instrument for a scattered population: people separated by oceans can talk to each other in real time, hold on to a shared identity abroad, and act together on behalf of those still in the country. Writers on diaspora have gone so far as to describe new public spheres forming online, though Parham notes they seldom connect this to the existing theoretical literature on the public sphere.

She applies that literature to a case, examining how members of a forum called Haiti Global Village actually used it. Her verdict is mixed. The forum did give participants room to argue about public questions and a workable structure for building contacts.

What it could not do was carry those gains into action offline, a failure Parham reads as evidence that ties rooted in physical place still matter. Other Haitian forums, she finds, point the same way.

Larrier assembles the ways nineteenth-century African Americans imagined and honoured Haiti, against a dominant discourse that cast it as a place of barbarity and a danger to the enslaved population of the United States. Black sailors carried news of the revolution north; refugees who settled in America supplied accounts said to have fed the plots of Denmark Vesey and Gabriel.

Five African American diplomats served in Port-au-Prince between 1869 and 1892. John Mercer Langston, who left the fullest personal record, describes a government built by black ability and is struck by the bearing of the officers who board his ship at Cap Haitien.

The black press followed the republic closely, running series on its history, schools, trade and treaties and rebuking Washington for withholding recognition. Two waves of emigration, encouraged by Boyer and later by a Haitian bureau, drew settlers who named their colonies after the cities they had left.