Thucydides wrote for readers who already knew where Acarnania lay and what a trireme could do. This edition assumes no modern reader does, and treats that gap as the reason the history so often defeats people who attempt it.

Around Crawley's translation the editors have set maps placed beside the passages they illustrate and naming only the places mentioned nearby, footnotes on geography and on disputed or corrupt readings, appendices on Greek warfare, religion and daily life, and an unusually full index. Because Thucydides moves season by season across every theatre of the war, the edition also supplies aids for following a single region through.

Hanson's introduction takes up the historian's own account of his method — first impressions distrusted, witnesses cross-examined, sites inspected — and the compressed, difficult style that later writers from Polybius onward were praised for imitating.

Americans of the mid-nineteenth century expected to die at home, surrounded by kin who would perform the rituals dying was supposed to involve. Faust shows how four years of war destroyed that expectation. Soldiers died among strangers and enemies, cut off from the women who bore most responsibility for the care of the living and the dead, in numbers no existing arrangement could absorb.

She takes the war's death work apart piece by piece. Killing demanded more of soldiers than dying did, she argues, because it required a sharper break with what they understood themselves to be, as men and as Christians. Burial posed a blunter problem: what to do with the bodies left after Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg, which defied both logistics and imagination.

Behind the practical questions sits one Faust keeps returning to, why corpses matter to the living, and what a society discloses about itself in the care it gives them.

Thousands of refugees from revolutionary Saint-Domingue landed in Louisiana, and their descendants have long claimed a large role in shaping New Orleans. Dessens takes the claim seriously enough to test it.

The hard part, she argues, is telling visibility apart from influence. The migrants were numerous and conspicuous, which is not the same as formative, and not every legend that has grown around them will survive scrutiny. She works through the migration itself, the reception the refugees met, the terms on which they settled, and then the mark they left on Louisiana's social, economic, political and cultural life, drawing on ideas of ethnicity, assimilation and creolization but applying them to this case rather than theorising them.

She insists on treating the refugees as one population in three legal conditions — white, free of colour, and enslaved — against a historiography that has tended to study them apart, and expects some of her conclusions to be disputed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meadows argues that the planter elite of Saint-Domingue cannot be studied inside the colony's borders. The families that mattered most were tied to France by property, kinship and association, so any account of their rise and collapse has to be written across the ocean.

When revolution in France and slave insurrection in the colony broke that world apart, more than thirty thousand people were set moving between Jamaica, Cuba, the southern United States, France and the eastern Caribbean. The largest single wave reached American ports in the late summer of 1793, after Le Cap Francais burned.

The study reconstructs these households through record linkage and a relational database, first as a demographic group portrait shaped by inheritance law and by movement over the life course, then as refugees whose displacement proceeded in stages. Its closing chapters read petitions and legislative debates from the Terror to the Consulate for what exile did to families and to their claims on the state.

Between 1824 and 1826, some six thousand free black people left the United States for Hispaniola. Hidalgo works through archives in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and the United States to follow the philanthropic and missionary effort behind that migration.

Earlier writing has read the episode either as a chapter in Black Nationalism in the United States or as the origin story of the community that remained on the island. Hidalgo looks instead at the white participants and what happened to them as they crossed lines of race and culture.

Two figures carry the study. Loring Dewey organized the emigration against powerful opposition, and the archival trail suggests his sense of himself was shaken by what he saw of the emigrants' condition. William Cardy, a British missionary who lived among the settlers, went through something similar: personal crises loosened his attachment to home and drew him toward the people he had come to convert.

Gilroy begins with a complaint about cultural studies. Its English formation borrowed from wider European traditions of thinking about culture in which racialised others figure only as things to be known and criticised, and its own histories seldom register how much they already owe to black cultural theory and to figures such as C. L. R. James and Stuart Hall. The motive he states for writing is to have black people recognised as agents with minds and an intellectual history.

Against nationalism and ethnic absolutism on every side -- the belief in cultural purity, the picture of black Britain as two intact communities colliding -- he offers units of analysis lodged between the local and the global, chief among them diaspora.

The ship is his organising figure: not an emblem of the triangular trade but a moving site of dissent and cultural production that links ports, recalls the middle passage, and unsettles where modernity is thought to begin.

Danticat gathers writing by Haitians in the United States, arranged in five movements: childhood, migration, the half or first generation, return, and the future. The contributors write about lives split between two countries, sometimes plainly, sometimes with a haunted edge.

The range is wide. Jean-Robert Cadet recalls a Port-au-Prince childhood spent as a restavek, enslaved in a household; Dany Laferriere remembers a boyhood in Petit-Goave with the grandmother he adored; Marie Helene Laforest describes discovering that the whiteness she had in Haiti became blackness in the United States. Others write about a detained refugee whose one wish is a red dress and the dignity it stands for, about alienation, about marrying across the color line, and about the frustrations of helping, including the visitors who take more from Haiti than they leave behind.

What holds the collection together is the divided self of the emigrant, turned over from many angles.

Fatton's term for post-Duvalier Haiti is predatory democracy. The forms are in place — parties, associations, a free press, elections held with some regularity — but the actors have never agreed on rules for competing, and each faction believes only it is fit to govern.

What fills that vacancy is a fight over the small number of offices through which public power converts into private wealth. Rival wings of the Lavalas petite bourgeoisie pursue it with armed gangs; everyone with resources has built a security apparatus, so coercion is dispersed among private forces that may escape whoever created them. A negotiated transition protected members of the old dictatorial coalition and installed them where they could veto, leaving authoritarian habits inside the new order.

Appearances mislead, as the Creole proverb has it: Préval held the office while power stayed elsewhere. Fatton stops short of calling the arrangement sealed — opposition, press and peasant organisations still leave openings.

Each year Rara fills Haitian streets, and its marchers, who follow the Afro-Creole religion Vodou, make noise in public on purpose. McAlister reads the festival as political work rather than as spectacle alone.

Her account rests on ethnographic material she gathered herself. The bands, she shows, draw on two reservoirs of power, the Vodou spirits and the people who have died recently, and use them to send messages out into public hearing.

Those messages are coded rather than stated outright. Read closely, they carry claims about Haitian history, about relations between men and women, and about the ties binding Haiti to Haitians living abroad.

The introduction to this volume argues that neither the European nor the Islamic vantage point will carry a history of Africa across these eighty years, since each illuminates only part of the continent.

Its central move is over vocabulary. What later writers dismissed as tribalism, the editors argue, was nationality: loyalty to a common language and social order, often among millions of people, which in Europe would be called by that name. Asante, Zulu, Ganda and Hausa-Fulani are treated accordingly as nations, several of them mature well before 1790.

After that date something new appears — states that expanded by absorbing outsiders into the ruling group's language and religion rather than holding them as tributaries. Shaka's age regiments turned captured men into Zulu; in the Sokoto caliphate Islamic political thought displaced older Hausa loyalties. European example will not account for this, though European pressure told in the north. Long-distance trade, the editors suggest, is the likelier engine.

Renda asks what nineteen years in Haiti did to the United States. The invasion of 1915 installed a puppet president, dispersed the legislature under arms, seized the customs houses, imposed a constitution friendlier to foreign investment and a system of forced labour, and killed Haitians in numbers that may have reached eleven thousand. In Haitian history this is a notorious chapter; in American history, barely a footnote.

Her method is to read the occupation as culture. Marines were not equipment to be positioned but men who had to be enlisted into the business of ruling, and paternalism was the language that enlisted them, from a cartoon marine scolding a childlike Haiti to Smedley Butler telling senators that the country was an estate held in trust for minors.

Renda follows those images home, through Seabrook's bestselling book and the schoolboys who wrote to a Marine sergeant, arguing that empire runs on stories as much as on guns.

By 1789 two-thirds of France's overseas trade came out of a single Caribbean possession, San Domingo, and the whole of that wealth — arguably the most profitable colony anywhere — was generated by half a million people held in slavery.

When the unrest set off by the French Revolution crossed the Atlantic in 1791, it split the loyalties of the island's white population. The enslaved, who had been treated with great brutality, took the opening and rose against their owners. James follows that rebellion, the one slave revolt in history to succeed, and gives an unsparing portrait of the man who led it.

Toussaint L'Ouverture emerges from the account as, in James's phrase, one of the most remarkable men of an age already full of them — a judgment the book earns rather than assumes.

This volume takes the African continent through the two centuries before 1790, a period when contact with Europe reached deep at only one point: trade, and above all trade in people. The editorial introduction tracks the escalation — roughly 13,000 captives shipped across the Atlantic yearly in the seventeenth century, more than 60,000 by the middle of the eighteenth — and the spread of the plantation system into the Indian Ocean.

Its emphasis falls on how much of the pace Africans still controlled. Europeans depended on African rulers and intermediaries; Benin barred the export of male captives, Loango traded ivory and copper instead, and decentralised societies could retaliate against raiders. The demographic consequences are treated as genuinely unsettled, since population figures are missing at both ends of the period. Regional chapters follow, among them a treatment of Ottoman Egypt, the Funj sultanate and Darfur.

Blackburn opens by describing the system that was about to come under attack. By 1770 New World slavery was not a leftover from an older order but something new. The sugar estate, with its calibrated labour and mechanical rhythms, half anticipated the factory, and the planter was an entrepreneur who could sit out war or slump on his estate's own subsistence and then expand hard when markets beckoned.

He separates this from the ancillary slavery of the early Spanish empire, where wealth came from conquering and taxing indigenous populations, and ties the newer form's growth to European appetite: sugar, tobacco and cotton were small pleasures that pulled ordinary people into a money economy and paid useful revenue to states.

The arithmetic is stark. Some six million captives landed in the Americas during the eighteenth century against roughly a million Europeans, with mortality so severe that a trade on that scale was needed merely to keep numbers from falling.

Blanning's introduction sets out what the volume's contributors have made of Europe since the French Revolution, and it reads largely as a study in how badly the continent handled its own modernization. Population more than doubled in the nineteenth century, life expectancy and literacy rose, and the class war Marx expected never came; the clergy lost most, the aristocracy diversified, and the middle classes set the cultural tone.

Culture is Blanning's own subject. Released from patronage by a literate public, the artist gained enormous status and then acquired a new master in the market, a friction he treats as productive rather than merely corrosive.

The twentieth-century chapters are bleaker: a single European civil war running from 1914 to 1945, a 1919 settlement that guaranteed the next round, a left divided against itself until too late, and total war ending in the Holocaust and the bomb.

Essays written over two decades set out a Caribbean poetics against both the totalizing claims of Western historiography and negritude's backward gaze toward Africa. Martinique, absorbed into France as an overseas department, is Glissant's extreme case: a place of what he calls nonhistory, where the dates that organize the record — abolition, the franchise, departmental status — were all settled elsewhere, and where the ruin of local production has left imitation as the only identity on offer.

Against this he proposes antillanité, a Caribbeanness founded on relation rather than descent. Creolization, not ancestry, is the region's governing process, and its emblems are the maroon's flight from the plantation, the carnival crowd, the whole forest rather than the single commanding tree.

Wandering away, in his terms diversion, counts for nothing unless reversion completes it by carrying people back to the point of entanglement, where the work must be done or they perish.

The volume's introduction surveys five and a half centuries of African history and makes communication its organising problem. Islam crossed the Sahara and ran down the East African coast, but the editor stresses how unlike the two cases were: in West Africa it entered existing societies, while the towns south of the Juba were foreign settlements around which African populations gathered, which is why the faith travelled so little way inland there.

Elsewhere the story is internal and the evidence thin. Radiocarbon dating had only lately become reliable enough for this period, so much depends on the older layers of oral tradition and on the first outside reports.

Two settlement patterns are drawn out. South of Hausaland lay walled towns supporting ironworking, weaving, dyeing and tanning, with cavalry behind their formation and open ground inside the walls for country people. West of the Volta, village kingdoms and the gold and kola trade of Dyula merchants did comparable work without horsemen.

This volume runs from roughly the mid-first millennium BC to the opening of the second millennium AD. Its editor concedes an awkwardness at the outset: the sources for northern Africa are far richer than for anywhere else, so the north can be handled in detail while the rest requires hypothesis, which risks making outsiders look more consequential than Africans.

Against that, Fage argues for a unity of subject on a continental scale. This is the stretch in which something recognisable as history begins almost everywhere in Africa, with only two exceptions: Egypt, long since part of an older written tradition, and the arid, thinly peopled south-west, which was still barely inside history as late as the nineteenth century. The volume opens with a long archaeological essay on the legacy of prehistory, reaching back through the Plio-Pleistocene toolmakers and Homo erectus, as the ground on which particular African cultures later took shape.

A picture-based reference for everyday English vocabulary, issued here in a Haitian Creole edition. Each English word is paired with its Kreyol equivalent, printed in blue directly beneath it, and the book supplies a full index in the second language.

The Haitian Creole version is one of twelve bilingual editions of the same dictionary, others being Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and more.

Dupuy examines Haiti's recent political history, setting out the policies and strategies pursued both by President Aristide and by the United States. The treatment is organized around an explicit analytic framework and weighs domestic and foreign factors together rather than privileging either.

Glissant begins in the hold of the slave ship: a place that swallows and dissolves, then expels, and that binds strangers into a shared unknown. It is the first of three abysses, the second being the sea floor marked by bodies thrown overboard in irons, the third the loss of everything left behind. From that unmaking he derives not a lost origin waiting to be recovered but another way of belonging.

Against the single root, which takes everything into itself and kills what grows nearby, he sets rhizomatic identity, extended through relation to others; against exile and errantry understood as deprivation, a rootedness that needs no totalising stock. He takes the rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari while declining their faith in nomadism as liberation.

The book's most quoted demand is for opacity — a right not to be made transparent, not to be reduced to somebody else's measure. Relation guards what can touch without being fused.

Eighteen case studies make up this collection, each concerned with women who held power in Africa. Kaplan's subjects are royal and elite women, brought into their positions by inheritance, by their own choosing, or by circumstance, and the volume examines the ritual and political offices through which they came to wield authority and sway, at home as well as in public life.

Around twelve ethnic groups from sub-Saharan Africa appear, most of them southern or West African.

Contributors are drawn from across the disciplines: religion, women's studies, art history, comparative literature, political science, history, and African as well as African American studies.

Clark assembled this volume as the first reasonably complete account of African prehistory, running from the earliest hominids of the Plio-Pleistocene to the point after about 500 BC when iron technology spread. Chapters are built to stand on their own, so material occasionally recurs; the editor treats that as intended rather than careless, and is scrupulous about how radiocarbon results are reported and where they have been calibrated against tree-ring sequences.

An opening chapter lays the physical groundwork: a continent of extremes, equatorial forest and the world's greatest hot desert, rift trenches and snow-capped volcanoes, basins lying well below sea level, and the climatic swings recorded in cave fills, lake margins, spring tufas and coastal gravels that decided where Acheulian populations could live.

Later chapters carry the story into the Saharan and Mediterranean Neolithic, the domestication of sorghum, millet and rice, Egypt and Nubia, and the first Iron Age.

Michel's account of Charlemagne Peralte is frankly commemorative: its sections are cantos, and the guerrilla leader's road to execution is told as a Calvary with his mother as the grieving witness. It begins at Hinche on the Central Plateau, where he grew up as the youngest son of General Massena Peralte, served at mass under the priest who would later hear his confession in prison, and formed the attachment to his mother that carried him through the war.

The narrative turns on late July 1915: the killing of prisoners in Port-au-Prince, the lynching of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam after crowds took him from the French legation, the execution of the hated post commander at Leogane where Peralte held authority, and the landing of the Marines at Bizoton that same afternoon.

The translator's introduction places him in a line from Louverture and Dessalines, and reads the occupation's methods as techniques the United States went on to use elsewhere. Documents are appended.

Trouillot argues that Haiti's color question can neither be detached from a worldwide hierarchy of races and cultures nor reduced to one. Nothing there resembles the apparatus familiar from segregated America - no color riots, no lynchings, no slurs on school walls - and yet color remains decisive, working through family alliance and serving as a favored idiom of politics.

His demonstration is demographic. Given how few light-skinned people survived the war of independence, genetics cannot explain the persistence of a category called clairs; only the social management of marriage can, and the boundary keeps sliding darker to keep it populated. He describes the resulting bargain: the ascending darker partner brings education and prospects, the lighter one what he calls epidermic capital, and the return arrives a generation or two later, in the children.

Because the color line and the income line move separately, prejudice cannot be read off class - the point Marxist accounts of noirisme and mulatrisme refuse.

Farmer's subject is not Haitian poverty but its manufacture. Following Gutiérrez, who asked that exploitation be studied concretely rather than deplored in general, he runs two investigations at once: a historical account of the economic and political forces that produced the crisis, and close attention to what those forces did to particular Haitians he has known.

The historical half is written deliberately from the losing side, in something close to the register Haitians use about their own past. American journalists have read that register as paranoia — the reflex of finding Washington's hand in everything — and Farmer's reply is that the specific charges, once checked, hold up. So did the peasant claim he first took for metaphor, that the United States trafficked in Haitian blood: under Duvalier, Hemo-Caribbean shipped tons of plasma a month to North American laboratories.

The 1991 coup and the HIV-positive refugees held at Guantánamo frame the whole argument.

Ani names her study after a figure from Dogon myth, a being born out of a refusal of cosmic order and bent thereafter on disturbing it. The book is an avowed polemic — an attempt to put Europe inside an African-centred frame and study it as European scholarship has long studied others.

Its premise is that European dominance rested less on arms than on culture, because a culture carries rules for thinking, and imposing one on the conquered narrows what they can imagine or intend. Decolonising the mind therefore has to come first, and teaching Pan-African studies well, she says, means teaching Europe alongside them.

The analysis runs on a vocabulary she builds herself. Asili is the seed or ideological core from which a culture's creations cohere; utamawazo is thought as that core patterns it; utamaroho is its driving energy. To these she adds the cultural other, and the rhetorical ethic — high talk about conduct meant only for effect.

Janken opens with his subject's lifelong refusal of the word "black" — a refusal so absolute that Logan would break off a conversation or resign from an organisation over it. He preferred "Negro," took the newer term for the property of racial chauvinists who denied that African Americans had European forebears, and reckoned his own ancestry in exact fractions.

The early chapters put that temperament in its setting: birth in 1897, at what Logan later called the nadir of African-American life, into a Washington with an established Black community and good segregated schools; a mother and grandfather from a county of free Negroes in northern Virginia, whose family stories of white kin and unclaimed inheritances he grew up hearing.

From there the narrative moves to the First World War, to the argument among African Americans over whose war it was, and to the Pan-African organising around Du Bois and Blaise Diagne that Logan would soon join.

The volume opens by taking stock of its own sources and of the scholarship that reads them. Documentary survival is thin and haphazard until the Ottoman records, after which a rich and systematically kept government archive becomes available; archaeology, epigraphy, palaeography, diplomatic and numismatics fill part of the earlier gap.

An account of European study follows. For a thousand years Christendom and Islam largely ignored or misread one another, the Christian side elaborating what has been called a deformed image of the religion and its founder. That gave way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as trade and diplomacy multiplied, Arabic entered the universities, and critical textual and archival method took shape. Erpenius, Golius and above all Pococke published the texts; d'Herbelot, Ockley and Sale carried the new understanding beyond the academy.

The history proper starts in pre-Islamic Arabia, treated at once as the last phase of Semitic antiquity in the Near East and as the prelude to medieval Islam.

Rouse sets out to restore a name and a history to the people Columbus met. They had no collective name for themselves, calling themselves after the islands they lived on; ethnohistorians settled on Taino. He sorts them into Classic groups in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Western groups in Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas, and Eastern groups in the small islands, arguing that populations at the edges stay conservative and shade into their neighbours.

Against the older view that these were recent migrants from the far headwaters of the Amazon, he brings four bodies of evidence — the Spanish chronicles, archaeology, historical linguistics and biology — to a single conclusion. The ancestors did come from South America, traceable to the Orinoco valley, but the Taino themselves took shape within the archipelago over millennia that radiocarbon dating has made visible.

He also separates them sharply from the Island-Caribs, whose alleged cannibalism colonists inflated to license enslaving them.

Thornton argues that the 1739 rising in South Carolina becomes legible once the participants' African past is taken seriously. Historians had already invoked African backgrounds to explain rice growing, folk medicine, language and religion in the low country, but had left the colony's largest slave revolt out of that reckoning.

Most captives shipped through Kabinda in the decades before 1739 probably came from Kongo, and Kongo was no blank to Europeans. A Kongolese wrote in Portuguese as early as 1491, schools stood in every provincial capital, and a creole Portuguese served as the language of trade across west-central Africa -- which helps explain how Spanish offers of freedom in Florida could reach these rebels and be understood.

Forty-four years of civil war after 1665 also meant that some of those sold had been soldiers. Carolina had closed militia service to slaves by that decade, while African armies were taking up the flintlock in exactly these years.

Trouillot takes apart a story Haitian intellectuals and foreign observers have told in chorus for well over a century: that the country has simply been unlucky in its rulers. Treat the state as a free-standing thing acting on society, he argues, and nothing is left but to trust whichever clique looks most promising. States are conditioned instead by where they came from, where they sit in the world order, and what productive base they tax.

Reading colonial Saint-Domingue for those conditions, he finds the pattern that outlasted it: slavery, dependence, export crops, the plantation - and against them a peasant way of working that the enslaved built inside the estate system and afterward defended. The elites who took power inherited the colonists' divided sense of belonging, proud of a black nation and oriented elsewhere at once.

Hence the title: state and nation were pointed away from each other from the outset, and Duvalierism follows from that divergence rather than interrupting it.

Bloch opens by asking where the word itself came from. 'Feudal' began as lawyers' jargon for whatever pertained to a fief; it was Boulainvilliers, and after him Montesquieu, who stretched it to name a whole state of society, and the revolutionary decree abolishing the feudal regime fixed it in the languages of Europe for good.

He thinks the label badly chosen. Not every manor was a fief, not every fief a principality, and no complex social order is well described by singling out one form of property right. But worn coins still circulate, and the historian may use the term so long as he defines what he means by it.

The inquiry is deliberately bounded: western and central Europe, the mid-ninth century through to the opening decades of the thirteenth. Whether societies elsewhere deserve the name is postponed to the end of the book.

Trouillot's case is the Commonwealth of Dominica, a marginal banana exporter, and his first claim is historical. Caribbean peasantries did not precede capitalism and were not disrupted by it. They came after the plantation, made up of people carried across the Atlantic by merchant capital, working crops brought from other continents. Tradition arrived after modernity; the rupture other theories treat as their endpoint is where analysis has to begin.

His second claim is conceptual. Political economy has dissolved the peasantry into simple commodity production, but what people actually do matters — whether they work on land or at sea, what they can grow, how a household divides its tasks. Banana growers, fishermen and seamstresses may all sell commodities while living differently, not least in how gender inequality takes shape among them.

He is wary too of the unit itself. Columbus named Dominica from a passing ship; the island as an object of study still has to be discovered, not assumed.

Hunt follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution through the antebellum United States and finds them less in policy than in imagination. Proslavery writers assigned Haiti to a tropical belt they thought naturally suited to black people; abolitionists borrowed the imagery of the Spanish black legend to render the slave South a place of cruelty and licence, with French, Catholic, sugar-growing Louisiana as its most lurid emblem. Melville and Faulkner both worked obliquely with the same association.

Some of the influence travelled with people. Refugees from Saint-Domingue settled across the Lower South, apprenticed their children, sued for freedom on the strength of the French abolition, opened academies in New Orleans and Natchez, and founded the French-language newspapers that kept Creole identity alive until after the Civil War.

Hunt also traces the alarm the revolution spread around the Caribbean and Spanish America, where Bolivar rebuilt his faltering movement under Petion's protection.

The organizing premise here treats a family the way analysts treat a firm: it reads its situation, weighs options, and acts on whatever looks like the most efficient route to producing and reproducing its own survival. Fass sets that premise against ten years of material gathered in Port-au-Prince homes, markets, and streets.

What follows is a close account of how relatives earn a living, share out what they have both inside a household and beyond it, convert food and water into life and labor, obtain shelter and schooling, and borrow to pay for all of it. These strands interlock: move one and the rest move.

Aid programs in credit, housing, schooling, health, and jobs often prove beside the point, Fass argues, because the concepts steering them misread how the urban poor actually live. He avoids easy criticism, noting that ideas do shift when new knowledge arrives — only slowly, at a price the poor are the ones to pay.

Written in numbered paragraphs, Lyotard's book concerns a conflict that no court can resolve. A litigation can be judged because the parties share an idiom; a differend arises where the injury one party has suffered cannot be phrased in the language the tribunal accepts, so that the injured are stripped not only of redress but of the standing to testify.

The trap recurs throughout: prove the harm and it was mere damage, fail to prove it and the claim collapses. Denial of the gas chambers, the old paradox of Protagoras and his pupil, and the worker who can appear before the law only as the proprietor of labor-power are each read as versions of it.

What is required, then, is a new way of forming phrases and joining them. Lyotard assigns literature, philosophy and perhaps politics the task of inventing idioms in which the unphrasable can be put into phrases.

Laguerre traces Haitian migration to New York from the beginning of the Duvalier era, when repression and a shrinking economy pushed mainly upper- and middle-class Haitians abroad, through the boat arrivals that began in 1972 and turned detention policy into a national argument. He notes the contrast with Cubans, received as refugees with federal support, and its consequences for undocumented Haitians who avoid public hospitals for fear of exposure and rely instead on folk remedies or Haitian-staffed clinics.

The book rests on fieldwork carried out in Haiti during the mid-1970s and in New York in 1977 and 1978. It works outward from the conditions that determine who leaves — household strategies, the pull of Port-au-Prince, the travel agent as broker — to the community that resulted: its Manhattan and Brooklyn blocks, its churches and Creole-language publications, its households and the strain between parents and children socialised in different worlds, and its portrayal in the American press.

Fouchard's subject is Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest colony any European power held in the Americas, from its earliest decades through the closing years of the eighteenth century, where his attention tightens.

At the center are fugitives from the plantations, maroons of both sexes, and leaders whose names have gone largely uncelebrated: Boukman, Macandal, Polydor. Through cunning, persistence and bloody sacrifice, Fouchard argues, they made the founding of the Haitian republic possible.

The story unfolds against the routine of enslaved life and the political currents running between the colony and Europe.

Candler, an English Quaker, coasted Haiti in 1839 on a missionary voyage to Jamaica and later travelled through the country. What struck him first was emptiness: mountains and shoreline running for hundreds of miles with no house, no field and no one in sight, a prospect he found grand and depressing at once.

Inland he found something else. He rides through villages, is fed by strangers, notes cane land gone back to pasture, and describes the coffee trade, the schools, the priests, the gaols and the army. Where Europeans charged Dessalines and Christophe with barbarity, he answers with Leclerc and Rochambeau drowning ironed prisoners in the bay off Cap Haïtien, and asks who was crueller.

His verdict is sympathetic but unsparing. Serious crime is rare and travellers safe; what holds the republic back, he argues, is ignorance, a clergy content to keep it so, and a military system that breeds petty vice.

Writing from Christophe's kingdom against the French colonial party and its correspondents at home, Vastey explains both why Haitians freed themselves and why they afterward turned on one another. He begins with a complaint about the record: no general account of Haiti has been written by a Haitian, and the European fragments that exist were assembled from planters' testimony and carry its prejudice.

His central claim is that the internal wars were manufactured abroad. Hedouville, he argues, came with secret instructions to divide Toussaint Louverture from Rigaud, and having failed with the first flattered the second into accepting a command he had no right to hold; the later conflict under Petion was that war's aftershock. Both generals, on this account, were tools of a France unable to restore slavery by force.

The polemic is aimed as much at writers in the republic - Colombel and Milcent are named again and again - as at Paris.

The body of law promulgated for Henry Christophe's kingdom in northern Haiti, presented to the king by his Privy Council with a dedicatory address that is itself part of the argument.

That address casts codification as an act of civilizational self-assertion. The council claims that no page of history offers a precedent for what has been done for the Haitian people, and that drafting these laws meant erasing the last vestiges of a system the nation has repudiated for good. Existing law is described as a patchwork of old edicts and ordinances, obscure enough to leave magistrates without authority and citizens without recourse.

What follows is a civil code together with laws of commerce, of prizes taken at sea, of civil and criminal procedure, of correctional and criminal police, of cultivation and of the military. The agricultural laws carry particular weight: the council presents the rural cultivator as the largest part of the population and farming as the state's foundation.

Haiti is the one post-emancipation society where the enslaved freed themselves by arms and took the state along with their freedom. Sheller asks what control and resistance could look like under those conditions, once colour and class still divided former planters from the field labourers who had risen through the revolutionary army.

Her title comes from a peasant retort to anyone enforcing a labour contract: the signature binds nothing if the signer can walk away. Sheller reads it as an embodied tactic, continuous with pre-independence flight from the plantation, and finds its cumulative effect in the collapse of large-scale agriculture across the nineteenth century, as land passed to veterans by military rank and estates broke up.

She frames the inquiry with Trouillot's argument that the revolution was unthinkable to contemporaries and remains marginal to accounts of modernity, then asks how much of the peasantry's own history the archive has silenced.

Zeuske asks how far the French Revolution actually registered in Spain's American colonies, and answers mostly in the negative. Reading Alexander von Humboldt's travel diaries against the books he later built from them, he shows that Humboldt expected no Creole revolution, anticipated instead a white republic that would keep slavery intact, and referred to France chiefly in connection with the Enlightenment or Napoleonic politics.

What officials and Creole elites genuinely feared was Saint-Domingue. That fear shaped policy: the expulsion of French residents, bans on importing slaves from the French islands, and a habit of labelling every conspiracy French whatever its real sources. Venezuela, Santo Domingo, Cuba and Puerto Rico each absorbed the shock differently, through refugees, black auxiliary troops fighting for Spain, and planters who hired Saint-Domingue managers to build new sugar and coffee economies.

Independence, when it came, is treated here as a shallow social revolution that left caste hierarchy and slavery largely standing.