Pierre gives the Haitian Declaration of Independence in Haitian Creole, working from the printed copy that Julia Gaffield located in Jamaica's national archives in February 2010 - no copy having been known in Haiti, and the whereabouts of the original still unknown.

A translator's note explains the choices. Boisrond-Tonnerre, one of Dessalines's secretaries, capitalized words in mid-sentence to mark their weight, and the translation keeps that habit so the emphasis the writer felt at the time survives into Creole. Punctuation is handled more freely, with very long sentences broken so readers are not lost. The work was undertaken through Duke University's Haiti Lab, on the conviction that a text amounting to the country's birth certificate should be legible to people who speak only Creole.

What follows is the January 1804 proclamation at Gonaives, the generals' oath and signatures, and Dessalines's address to the population, set beside images of the French original.

A community study of Toco, on the northeast coast of Trinidad, offered not as a portrait complete in itself but as one specimen within the range of New World Negro cultures, to be read against both its African past and its functioning present.

The analysis rests on stated premises. Culture is learned rather than issued with the body, so a tradition devised by one people can be taken up by any other given the chance to learn it. Contact quickens borrowing, but the particular circumstances of a contact decide how much of the old survives, and what is adopted is reworked rather than swallowed whole.

Borrowing is also uneven. It gathers where a people's interest already lies — the cultural focus — which in settled conditions makes that the most receptive zone and, where change is forced, the most stubbornly defended. Toco's religious life is examined with these propositions in hand.

Payton began with a narrow question, why Port-au-Prince's buildings failed so completely in 2010, and ended with a history of how the city was made. Taking the capital's explosive growth after 1950 as her point of departure, she reads its geographic and material forms as expressions of the same processes that underpinned the Duvalier regime between 1957 and 1986.

Some of the evidence is explicit, such as the politics behind the airport's construction and the ideological meaning invested in it. Some is oblique: elite neighborhoods raised over fragile aquifers in the 1970s reveal a deliberate environmental neglect that kept powerful interests satisfied.

Working from historical maps, archival and printed sources, oral histories collected from earthquake survivors and her own years living in the city, she treats slum clearance, transport infrastructure and the politics of cement as ways into the dictatorship's logic and its international setting, and into what she calls its infrastructures of corruption.

Schoelcher builds his life of Toussaint from documents, quoting dispatches, ministerial instructions, speeches to the Constituent Assembly and colonial memoirs, and arguing openly with the authorities he cites.

He starts with the free men of colour, some of them educated in Paris at the expense of white fathers, whose petition for civil and political rights in October 1789 met a courteous evasion. He follows the rising of 1791 and the bands of Jean-Francois and Biassou, who after the execution of Louis XVI took Spanish pay and royalist cockades and swelled their forces with enslaved men drawn by the promise of standing as free men.

The abolitionist purpose is never concealed. Schoelcher reproduces a colonist's tirade against people of mixed descent as evidence of how imbecilic colour prejudice could become, and records with disgust that once their own rights were won, men of colour sent the slaves they had roused back to the workshops.

The 1811 rising on Louisiana's German Coast survives, Rasmussen argues, mainly as the planters' account of itself. Governor Claiborne and the sugar planters turned a rebellion into a story about their own politics, and the historians who followed kept that framing: those who diminished the insurgents' agency and the Marxists who reversed the tone told substantially the same story.

Working from court records, plantation ledgers, reimbursement claims, newspapers and letters, several newly translated and some never used before, the study reads against the grain to recover what the enslaved were doing and why. It moves from the geography of the Mississippi and the sugar economy that made New Orleans, through the conditions of plantation labour, to the march itself and its suppression.

Considerable attention goes to the aftermath: the systematic beheadings, the heads mounted on poles along the river road, and the ritual of terror by which order was restored.

Foreign travellers and the international press have long cast Haiti as the land of zombies and sinister rites. Laguerre sets that literature aside and treats Vodou instead as a factor in the distribution of power, one that helps structure relations among the country's social sectors and whose political dimension, he argues, has never been examined systematically.

His account is historical. Under slavery Vodou served as a channel for a movement seeking religious, cultural and political freedom when no institutional means existed. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state's policies shaped how the religion organised itself, while the religion in turn worked its way into politics at local and national level.

Its ideology, ritual and dealings with the state therefore changed as circumstances did, and Laguerre presents its politics as largely reactive, formed in response to constraints generated elsewhere in society.

Fieldwork inside two development organisations in Port-au-Prince supplies the material for this study of how Haitians talk about development, and of what that talk accomplishes. Joersz treats the question named in her title as one people ask constantly among themselves, diagnosing failure, assigning historical blame and imagining what should be done.

Rather than reading development as a dominant ideology imposed from outside, the analysis borrows from linguistic anthropology and treats speech as a form of action. Meetings, arguments and everyday conversation become sites where participants negotiate standing, press claims against one another and address themselves to those holding power. Development supplies both a way of ordering time and a moral demand.

Set against a combative political climate in which rival interpretations of any actor or institution are fought over openly, such talk emerges as a means of forming and reforming political commitments at once personal and national.

A collaborative handbook on how the African past is reconstructed, addressed to historians who must work largely without written records. Opening essays treat history as a human artefact, reinterpreted by each generation as fresh evidence and new social theory arrive, before turning to the disciplines that supply the raw material.

Contributions take up archaeology and the imprecisions of stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating; historical linguistics, where a reconstructed proto-word for goat testifies to ancient herding as surely as an excavated object; human biology and the muddle created by the notion of race; botany and crop domestication; art treated as a visual document; and European-language accounts from the late fifteenth century, whose trading and missionary authors carried obvious prejudices but were present when no other observer was.

Oral evidence runs through the whole. Contributors examine how traditions were gathered, the distorting role of interpreters, the failure to deposit recordings for others to check, and the recovery of voices elite sources ignore.

A photographer's record of Vodou as Haitians practise it, drawn from work Galembo began in 1996 after years documenting Edo ritual dress in Nigeria and Candomble communities in northern Brazil. Her portraits favor costume, altar and ceremonial setting: cemeteries whitewashed for the November gathering of the Gede, temple interiors, priests and priestesses photographed in the regalia of the spirits they serve.

Fleurant's introduction supplies the history the images assume, running from the arrival of enslaved Africans on Hispaniola after 1502 through the French seizure of the island's western third in 1697 and the plantation expansion that followed, and treating Vodou as the memory of home those captives carried and kept.

Short texts by Vodou scholars, practitioners and artists accompany the plates, with a glossary and bibliography. The aim throughout is to set the tradition against the sensational reputation it carries abroad.

Bourhis-Mariotti traces how Haiti came to occupy the imagination of free and emancipated African Americans in the decades before the Civil War. As conditions in the United States worsened and colonization schemes aimed at Africa met resistance, black activists increasingly named the young Caribbean republic as the place where a people might govern itself.

The subject here is not the departures themselves, which earlier historians have covered, but the advocacy that produced them: a body of persuasion written and circulated largely by Blacks, and built more on hope than on reporting, since very few emigrants or travelers had sent anything back. James Theodore Holly gave the argument a providential shape. By 1860 President Geffrard's government had hired James Redpath to run an emigration bureau from American soil, and Redpath recruited black lecturers and newspapers to sell the plan.

Read this way, the campaign restores the range of black abolitionist thought and the initiative Blacks took within it.