Popkin's opening chapter is mostly an argument about what the events of 1791 to 1804 were not. The phrase Haitian Revolution places them beside the American and French revolutions, but it also implies a coherence they lacked: the slave insurrection broke out in one of three provinces and ran alongside a separate rising of free people of colour with quite different aims, frequently in conflict with it.

Toussaint Louverture fits the revolutionary mould no better. Whether he had any hand in starting the 1791 revolt remains unclear, he rejected the first French emancipation decree, and the labour laws he imposed drove many blacks to take up arms against him.

The consequences were nonetheless global, from Britain's prohibition of the slave trade in 1807 to a European turn toward colonies in Africa itself, in a country whose settlement only became legible decades after independence.

Thornton sets out to unsettle a collective memory of the Americas that still runs in one direction, from Europe outward. His remedy is Atlantic history practised less as heritage-keeping or moral judgement than as social science: societies are set beside one another because the comparison is analytically useful, not because one of them is ours.

The opening pages take up early European voyaging, then treat Europe, Africa and the American continents in turn, comparing political forms as far apart as those of the Iroquois and the Tupi. A middle section sorts expansion into three kinds of encounter, conquest, colonization and contact, which lets in regions normally dropped from such accounts: the American West, the western Caribbean, Atlantic Africa itself, places where Europeans arrived as guests or were thrown out.

Culture comes late and stays comparative, taking up the survival and loss of languages, virtuosity in aesthetic forms, and revelation in religion.

Berry studies accusations of poisoning across the slave societies of the Atlantic, assembling a body of more than five hundred cases from Bahia, the Dutch Guianas, Virginia and Martinique and reading them alongside one another rather than colony by colony. The comparison brings out what no single archive shows: statutes written under very different regimes, and the prosecutions mounted under them, rose and subsided along strikingly similar curves through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

An opening chapter uses reconstructed African root words together with European philology to follow how notions of poison, healing and sorcery shifted on both sides of the ocean before people carried them west. The remaining chapters change vantage point in turn: slaveholders and officials, who read poisoning as a seizure of their authority; the enslaved, who sought out healers of African descent and sometimes set investigations against those same healers in motion; and the practitioners themselves, valued and feared for what they knew.

Dayan returns to Haiti's past to trace how one place came to carry pride and contempt at once. The essay settles on 1889, when Frederick Douglass took up the post of minister resident and consul general to the government of Louis Florvil Hyppolite, and on the American push to obtain the Mole St. Nicholas.

Douglass's own account, set down in the closing chapters of Life and Times, supplies much of the material. There he casts the Americans pressing the claim as men after money regardless of what it cost others in life and misery, calling them sharks and pirates. Dayan sets that judgment beside the "badge of servitude," a mark its holders found far too useful to give up.

The terms of that stigma, the essay contends, underwrote and continue to sustain the arrangements that keep paired opposites such as civility and brutality in working order, and that fix the rules for a modern idea of servility.

Richman follows Haitian migrants in South Florida who arrived Catholic and have since joined evangelical Protestant congregations, and asks what conversion does for them. It supplies, she argues, both a usable script for individual advancement in the United States and an exit from the thick obligations — to kin, to the lwa, to ritual work back home — that transnational life would otherwise enforce. Pastors give converts the means to shrug off the unseen penalties that make those obligations stick.

The break is less clean than separatist Protestantism claims. Under the ascetic style, Richman finds the imagery of sudden money and private ambition that properly belongs to sorcery, and some Haitians say so openly, naming the pastors as sorcerers themselves and unusually effective ones. Catholicism, Vodou and Protestantism, on this account, define and reproduce one another across one religious field that runs from Léogâne to the diaspora.

Snelgrave, an English slaving captain who worked the Guinea coast in the first decades of the eighteenth century, sets down what he saw there for readers at home and, pointedly, for the London merchants he addresses in his dedication.

The longest section recounts the Dahomean king's overthrow of the kingdom of Whydah and the author's own journey inland to the victor's camp, where captives were put to death in ceremonies he describes at length. Other parts explain how Africans came to be sold into bondage, count the numbers shipped annually to America, and describe revolts aboard the ships he commanded; a further narrative tells of his capture by pirates in 1719. His preface anticipates disbelief, citing witnesses then living in London who could confirm the sacrifices and the cannibalism he reports.

The shorter sections began as an answer to a friend who doubted whether the trade was lawful. Snelgrave defends it, then leaves the reader to judge.

Holly delivered this address to a literary society of young colored men in New Haven in 1855, after returning from Haiti, and repeated it through Ohio, Michigan and Canada West before it was printed. Its declared object is to defend the inherent capability of people of African descent to govern themselves and to build a civilization.

His evidence is Haitian history from the revolution onward. The defense is needed, he argues, not only against open contempt: many who profess to be friends of the race carry a private doubt about equality that surfaces the moment full recognition is pressed on them, and their reticence leaves the field to detractors until the oppressed half accept the verdict themselves.

The lecture then works through the events leading to the rising, the composure of the blacks under it as proof of fitness to govern, the intervention of free men of color, and the record of national enterprise and governmental stability since independence.

Settling Black Americans somewhere outside the United States was a respectable proposal for most of the nineteenth century, entertained by presidents from Jefferson onward and resting on the assumption that Black people could never take an equal place in a white society. Lincoln inherited the idea and acted on it.

Lockett reconstructs what happened when it was tried. Bernard Kock, a promoter from Charleston, talked Geffrard's government into a long lease on Île à Vache, then talked Washington into sending settlers there on the strength of glowing descriptions. Roughly 450 formerly enslaved people sailed on the Ocean Ranger in April 1863.

The island was not what Kock had advertised. Agents sent to inspect the colony reported people still in the Union uniforms they had arrived in, saying they had been deceived and asking to be taken home. By January 1864 conditions were declared a disaster, the managers had abandoned the place, and the survivors were brought back.

Thornton sets out to correct an imbalance in Atlantic history, where the crossing of Europeans has drawn far more attention than the larger African migration that accompanied it. Working outward from Braudel's idea of a region defined by its sea, he treats Africa not as a passive supplier but as a set of societies whose rulers and merchants set the terms of contact.

The first half examines commerce, warfare and politics on the African coast. European goods, Thornton concludes, were largely luxuries that neither displaced local industry nor made Atlantic trade necessary to African prosperity, and Europeans lacked the military strength to compel any exchange, including the traffic in captives. Slavery was already embedded in African legal and political life, which allowed elites to push its costs onto poorer neighbours.

The second half turns to the Americas, arguing that transplanted Africans had room enough to shape religion, revolt, language and maroon settlement, often extending changes that had begun at home.

Laguerre separates folk medical knowledge from the cosmopolitan medicine of hospitals and journals largely by how each is stored and passed on. Written knowledge accumulates, crosses borders and survives unaltered; oral knowledge belongs to a family or a locality, changes a little with every telling, and vanishes once the need it answered has gone.

Much of the book sorts the Afro-Caribbean repertoire into kinds: cures credited to a named discoverer or to a spirit who learned healing at the world's beginning, remedies that work by symbolic likeness, such as red food and drink for weak blood, and the division between what anyone may learn and what is inherited within cult groups and disclosed in dreams.

He then follows these traditions through the plantation, where the enslaved community's medical knowledge is treated as a collective memory reassembled under duress, and onward through Asian indenture and black migration to northern American cities, each encounter yielding fresh syncretism.

Haiti is the Caribbean's oldest independent state and, in Lewis's account, one of its most awkwardly placed members. Admired for the revolution that founded it and kept at arm's length for the political turmoil that followed, the country was the last to enter CARICOM, joining only in 1997.

That double attitude, Lewis argues, has produced regional policy toward Haiti that pulls in two directions at once. The clearest case is CARICOM's handling of the February 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the period that followed.

The paper asks why the relationship stays so unsettled despite Haiti's weight in the region. It works through the historical roots of Haiti's ties to CARICOM and through the ways member governments have responded to successive Haitian crises, with particular attention to the post-Aristide years. Lewis concludes that goodwill has existed on both sides, but that much of what regional cooperation with Haiti promised has not been delivered.

A systematic description of Dahomean religion, arranged as its practitioners arrange it, by pantheon. Mawu heads the account as parent of the gods and the source of their power, the one who holds the formulae for making people and things and who sent divination down so that human beings might learn to deflect the anger of the ruling deities. The Sky pantheon is treated first, then the Earth pantheon, each with its priests, its initiates and its ceremonies.

Alongside the great gods stands the cult of the deified ancestors, built on the clan founders known as Tohwiyo and reaching into food prohibitions and the rites for the royal dead. A later section takes up magic and the semi-divine beings of the forest who connect it to the gods — Minona, the goddess of twins, the children said to be born to die and return. Serpent worship is examined and the charge of a phallic cult set aside.

Anglade treats Haitian territory as something produced rather than given. Two processes, he argues, made the society and its space together: the formation of a market with its catchments, crossroads and connections, and the exercise of power through the carving up of territory and the planting of a graded set of institutions for control and conditioning.

He periodises this in three moments. Colonial fragmentation extended Europe overseas under a trade pact; the nineteenth century regionalised the Americas around strongmen, landowners and provincial wars; the twentieth welded regional markets into national ones and produced a capital that operates as a republic inside the republic. Emigration, he adds, now obliges anyone thinking about national space to include the diaspora in the hierarchy of centres.

The regional chapters take the argument into detail, counting sugar works, indigo works, cotton and coffee estates plain by plain and reading density against irrigation, wind and altitude.

Ibrahim collects and extends his work on continental African newcomers to Canada and the United States, a group he says immigration research has largely passed over. His organising claim is that nobody is born Black: Blackness is performed daily through speech, dress and bearing, and immigrants become Black through a process that ties their sense of themselves to non-immigrant Black populations.

Language carries much of the argument. Learning Black English, treated here as a second language, is inseparable from that becoming, and hip-hop functions as a curriculum schools decline to teach while young people invest in it heavily.

Other chapters borrow from Deleuze and Guattari to insist that Blackness is multidirectional rather than uniform, use Derrida to propose unconditional hospitality as a model for how teachers should receive students, and reconsider research ethics in immigrant communities, arguing that fieldwork should humanise rather than extract.

Wynter's manuscript opens by refusing the terms of an old quarrel. Where Herskovits and Frazier disputed how much culture enslaved Africans had kept or lost, she treats the premise itself - the myth of a cultural void - as an instrument of domination: literacy was made the measure of being human, Christian theology recast other peoples' gods as demons, and to be outside Europe became to be outside humanity.

She names the resulting ideology after Sepulveda and insists on its material function, the theologian having been retained by colonists defending their claim on Indian labor. An argument drawn from theories of unequal exchange follows: because the enslaved were a workforce forbidden to move, the bundle of goods keeping them alive stayed fixed while wages rose elsewhere.

Against this she sets indigenization, whereby exiles remade a homeland - Africa surviving as the living country of ancestors one might join - with revolt and marronnage at its center.

Mbembe writes from the conviction that the planet has entered an age of combustion, its resources, atmosphere, water and food visibly degrading while public discourse fills with predictions of collapse. He is unsatisfied with that mood, noting that many peoples have long had to make life out of ruin, and that withdrawal and the hardening of borders are themselves political postures.

Brutalism is his name for a form of power admitting no outside and no exit. It binds together economic calculation, digital computation and the biological sciences on the premise that living beings and machines are no longer distinguishable, humanity turning artificial as objects and machines take on life.

Against this he sets a demand for planetary consciousness and for a refounded human community standing in solidarity with everything alive, arguing after Fanon that genuine struggle begins as reparation, with the repair of what has been broken.

Johnson reads the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's work on burial customs and kinship in the rural town of Kenscoff as a source for the history of women's rights organizing in the wake of the American occupation of 1915 to 1934.

Two bodies of material sit side by side: Comhaire-Sylvain's field notes from 1937 and 1938, along with unpublished writing on family cemeteries and ceremonies, and the essays she published in La Voix des Femmes, a feminist periodical of the interwar decades. Moving through the space of the dead, at once tactile and fleeting, she worked out the commitments of an emerging Haitian feminism.

Mourning and political organizing are treated as comparable settings, both places where culture and the meanings attached to gender are made and remade. Comhaire-Sylvain's research itself becomes a form of public mourning, and a way into the intellectual life of elite Haitian women early in the twentieth century.

Patte's dictionary answers the question of what Christianity is not through an entry under that heading but through the whole of its three and a half thousand articles. Its working definition is deliberately wide: anyone claiming to follow Jesus Christ counts, which admits Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Anglicans alongside the fast-growing independent and charismatic churches and the groups usually filed as marginal.

No tradition serves as the benchmark. The volume avoids calling anyone a saint except where the word belongs to an institution's name or is plainly flagged as one church's judgement, and it uses the label heretic only where it is clear who is applying it.

Behind these choices lies an editorial commitment, argued by way of Spivak, neither to speak to nor to speak for believers in other cultural settings. Contributors present their own traditions; the historical coverage is anchored in a cluster of survey articles on world Christianity.

Gathered here are two monographs and the remains of a longer work by a Roman senator turned historian, whose own career shapes the disenchantment of the writing: expulsion from the senate, service under Caesar, a governorship in Africa, and charges of extortion on his return.

The first monograph treats the conspiracy of 63 BCE, a subject Cicero had already worked hard to keep before the public. Sallust offers another vantage, presenting Catiline as the sharpest symptom of a republic corroded by luxury, greed and ambition, and tracing that decay back well beyond the plot itself. The second turns to the war fought in Numidia late in the second century, where the king begins as a young man of promise and is spoilt by contact with a Rome in which everything had its price, and where the arrogance of the nobility meets its first real challenge.

The Histories, covering the years between, survive only in fragments, speeches and letters.

The revolution in Saint-Domingue reorganised mainland politics long before the Civil War settled anything, Horne argues, and the reorganisation ran through the people who fled it. Refugees carried their terror to North America and were absorbed into the slaveholding republic as useful allies: Judah P. Benjamin's father-in-law, who lectured audiences on African treachery, or Louis Tousard, who helped establish West Point after trying to suppress the 1791 revolt.

Haiti's existence sharpened an existential choice for slaveholders between retreating from slavery and risking everything, while arriving Frenchmen were courted as a demographic counterweight to the enslaved. Spain, Britain and the United States all watched Hispaniola nervously, and Grant's push to annex the Dominican Republic closed in 1871 a cycle that had opened in 1791.

A second thread follows the island's pull on mainland Africans, enslaved and free, for whom Haiti was a destination and an argument rather than a warning.

Allman surveys how couples in Haiti form unions and why comparatively few Haitian women are legally married. Historical and present-day pressures behind that pattern are reviewed first, followed by a scheme for sorting Haitian unions into categories that carry cultural meaning rather than imported ones.

The evidence comes mainly from the 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey, together with its pretest. Allman examines what kind of union people are in and how old they were entering their first, along with the background characteristics associated with each.

Union patterns are then treated as something in motion, with figures on how many unions and partners people have and how often plural unions occur, set out for towns and for the countryside. Norms governing sexual behaviour come in for discussion, and the paper closes by weighing what the findings suggest for later research.

Sheller's subject is the long habit of consuming the Caribbean, its sugar and its scenery, its bodies, its images, and by now its literature and theory. Her claim is that the practices that carried goods out of the islands under slavery never stopped, but changed shape.

She declines a purely geographical definition of the region, treating it instead as an effect and a set of practices as much as a place, denaturalized and renaturalized as paradise through maps, voyage accounts, botanical collecting and later through tourism and area studies. Travel writing is accordingly a central archive, read alongside the careers of the objects that crossed the Atlantic.

Chapters follow shifting views of Caribbean nature, the openness and vulnerability of the region's economies, its use for medical testing and pharmaceutical development, and the metropolitan academy's appetite for Caribbean writing. The argument is tied to the reparations debate that followed the Durban conference of 2001.

A collection of Haitian folktales taken down from named tellers and printed in Creole with English translations alongside, so that the language of the telling survives with the story.

The tales turn on jealous brothers and a murdered sister, on a bone that sings its accusation as each member of the family walks past, on a disagreeable old woman in the woods outwitted by a boy who sings about fleas until she opens her door. Songs run through them, some with their melodies transcribed, and the collector marks which ones are sung in French dialect rather than Creole.

The footnotes carry the ethnography. They name the tellers and where they lived, gloss idioms word for word, explain terms such as the cooperative kumbit work party, and record honestly when an informant could not say what a word meant. Each tale closes with comparative references to versions in the Dominican Republic, Louisiana, the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica, Egypt, Algeria and further afield.

After the earthquake of January 2010, the plans drawn up for Haiti's recovery leaned heavily on garment assembly and on expanding the country's export processing zones. Edwards asks whose interests that answer served.

His argument turns on a split inside American business. Textile mills, long protectionist, had used trade preference schemes to keep Haiti as a captive offshore sewing floor supplied with US cloth. Apparel firms organised around global sourcing wanted something looser. Tracing the trade legislation passed in response to a sequence of Haitian disasters, he shows authority moving steadily from the first bloc to the second.

The earthquake, on this reading, functioned as an opening rather than an interruption: a moment when Haiti's place in the apparel commodity chain could be rewritten. What emerged was not development but a redefined position inside a network of low-wage assembly work that can be moved wherever it is cheapest, with the country's poverty as the attraction.

Hallward begins from a discrepancy. The 1991 coup against Aristide drew international condemnation and a campaign for his restoration; the coup that removed him again in February 2004 met resignation, indifference, or approval. In the interval a president twice elected by landslide had been rewritten in mainstream commentary as corrupt, aloof and hostile to rights, so that his removal could be presented as a service to Haitian democracy.

The book reconstructs how that was accomplished: sustained misrepresentation in the press, foreign-funded democracy promotion aimed at manufacturing an opposition, and finally armed intervention with American and French backing. Hallward rates it the most effective piece of neo-imperial subversion since the defeat of the Sandinistas, and the more so for scarcely registering as a coup at all.

He also weighs what Lavalas managed and where it failed, setting the movement's emergence in the 1980s against the Duvaliers, the Macoutes, and an elite structurally insulated from the poor majority.

A magistrate of the colonial courts, Moreau de Saint-Mery spent years assembling material for a parish-by-parish account of the French half of Hispaniola, printed at Philadelphia in 1797 during his exile. No other French colony, and few provinces of the kingdom, received anything comparable.

The survey takes in terrain, population, history, farming, manufacture and craft, social and intellectual life, entertainments and meeting places, and the administrative, judicial and charitable institutions of the colony. Its accounts of the towns and settlements are a first-rate source for colonial urbanism, and the pages on hospitals are unusually full.

It also documents its author's mind. Moreau sorts the colony's inhabitants into an elaborate ladder of complexions between white and black, treats those gradations as fixed by nature, and hangs on them judgements about character, idleness, courage and fitness for particular kinds of work. The line he draws between white ancestry and every other, he writes, runs on to infinity.

Wood follows Jean-Jacques Dessalines from his service as one of Toussaint Louverture's generals to the throne of an independent Haiti. The account opens with Leclerc's expedition of 1801, the wave of defections that came once word spread that Napoleon meant to restore slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the campaign that ended in Rochambeau's capitulation and the proclamation at Gonaives on the first day of 1804.

The portrait that follows is not admiring. Illiterate, despotic and feared, Dessalines governed a country kept permanently on a war footing, maintained an army that absorbed much of the eligible male population, and sorted every citizen into soldier or laborer under a regime of compulsory field work. He annulled colonial-era land transfers to free people of color and ordered titles reverified, embittering black and mixed-race proprietors alike. Crowned Jacques I late in 1804, he was killed two years later.

Bourdieu's material is a French survey of 1,217 people carried out in 1963 and 1967-68, asking what respondents liked in painting, music, furniture, clothing and cooking, and what they knew about each.

Two findings organise everything that follows: cultural practice tracks educational qualification first and father's occupation second, and the same social logic runs through the whole range of preferences, so that a taste in art predicts a taste in food. The concepts built on this — cultural capital as an inheritable asset convertible into money and position, habitus as the unifying principle behind a group's preferences, the field of legitimating institutions that decides what counts as art — dissolve the separation between class and status that sociology had inherited.

The argument is aimed squarely at the philosophical tradition that treats aesthetic judgement as disinterested. There is no standing outside the game, Bourdieu insists; the sociologist is in it too, and must say so.

Dash follows Glissant from the early poetry through the novels to the theoretical essays, treating them as one continuous project. Glissant emerges as a writer who declines two temptations at once: the bleak verdict that Caribbean communities are cultural wrecks, and the search for untouched origins that would fix identity in a pure past.

The refusal shapes even the biography. Dash notes how little Glissant discloses about his beginnings in the hill commune of Sainte-Marie, and reads his suspicion of founding fathers — Schoelcher, the maroon progenitor, Columbus, Césaire himself — as part of a diagnosis of dependency in the French departments. What autobiography there is has been dispersed into characters such as Mathieu and Mycéa.

Chapters on the early collections and Les Indes, then on La Lézarde and Le quatrième siècle, show landscape used not as a settled belonging but as movement: mountain against sea, the river descending to the plain.

What stands here is the general introduction Manigat wrote for the last two volumes of his series, given over to Haitian diplomacy and international relations from Toussaint Louverture to the present. He calls it an examination of conscience of a history and of a historian, and it doubles as a critical autobiography written in the spirit of the Annales and of a history meant to be living rather than antiquarian.

The life carries the argument. A schooling in Haitian and Catholic tradition, study in Paris, a quarter-century of political exile and finally the constitutional presidency of 1988, ended after five months by the army, are set against the country's own sequence: the Caribbean as inseparable from Haitian identity, independence as the ground of haitianite, several distinct revolutions in 1946, an intellectual spring frozen by Duvalier, and two populisms that each failed.

Manigat offers the pages as material for younger readers to argue with.

Jackson follows the Haitian teachers, doctors and engineers recruited into the United Nations civilian operation in Congo after independence from Belgium. Haiti supplied one of the largest national contingents in the mission, and Haitians held senior posts in UNESCO's Africa division, the WHO medical team and, by 1963, the ONUC military command.

The research pairs interviews conducted in Montreal, Paris, New York and Port-au-Prince with archival records in Kinshasa, in Haiti and at United Nations headquarters. Raoul Peck, whose father went out with the first contingent, is among the informants; against the assumption that these migrants lived as privileged expatriates, he recalls a first year without a car, riding the same crowded buses as Congolese workers. Andree Blouin's memoir gives the contrary view, of Haitians arriving by way of Papa Doc and blending in too easily.

He uses that tension to question both the picture of Haitian migrants as destitute refugees and the reading of international organizations as neo-colonial machinery.

Jung reads Haitian fiction and poetry written between 1968 and 2010 for what it reveals about manhood under authoritarian rule. Works by Marie Vieux Chauvet, Rene Depestre, Franketienne and others supply the evidence.

The historical anchor is the Duvalier period. From 1957 to 1986 Francois and then Jean-Claude Duvalier governed through fear and terror, and Jung contends that this apparatus generated its own dominant model of manhood, built on domination and sustained by pushing rival versions of masculinity to the margins. The regime, on this reading, fed on the very people it depended upon, an appetite Jung describes as self-devouring.

The larger question is whether repression that severe can produce other ways of being a man. Literature written under and about the dictatorship, Jung argues, does more than talk back to the official script; it also opens ground on which the period's damage can be worked through.

Prompted by Laurent Dubois's argument that the Haitian Revolution has been undervalued because the enslaved left so few written sources, Johnson asks what that means for the world history survey course.

Her answer rests on a survey of the textbooks. Most now mention Haiti, often filed with the Latin American independence movements or attached to France, and some name Boukman, Ogé and Dessalines. Africa is largely absent: the enslaved appear stripped of the political and military traditions they carried across the Atlantic, and few textbook authors are Africanists. She also flags the routine misuse of "mulatto" for the whole free population of colour.

Earlier pieces by Peguero, Garrigus and Sepinwall get their due, but Johnson wants more than a slot on the syllabus. Teaching the revolution well, she argues, means showing both what the world did to Haiti and what Haiti did to the world — and choosing a textbook whose own apparatus can carry part of that load.

Three concerns organize Bongie's book: the consolidation of francophone postcolonial studies into a field over the preceding decade and its uneasy relation to literary study; the recent turn in postcolonial theory away from culture and back toward the properly political; and the insistence, in France and its Caribbean departments, on a duty to remember discharged through commemoration.

He takes seriously the charge that the field has been politically weightless and has averted its eyes from its own place in a global market for postcolonial writing, treating Hallward's dismissal as a hypothesis worth pursuing to the end. On memory he stays deliberately divided, skeptical of remembrance organized as a governmental imperative yet unwilling to pretend that something purer is available.

Its historical center is the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath — the country split between Pétion in the south and Christophe in the north after Dessalines was killed — read as a test of whether taking sides remains possible.

A single-volume account of American foreign relations from the Revolution onward, tracing how a scattering of coastal colonies hemmed in by hostile neighbors and rival empires became the dominant power in world politics, and how that ascent was understood by the people who managed it.

The organizing claim is that foreign policy has never been peripheral to American life. Outside help secured independence; anxieties about commerce and foreign threats shaped the Constitutional Convention of 1787; diplomacy mattered to the survival of the young republic and to how the Civil War ended. The picture of an isolationist America is treated as a myth that flatters the national self-image, since the country has been an active participant in world affairs since 1776.

War carries much of the narrative. Each generation has had one, and those conflicts both fed the myths of national virtue and marked the stages by which the United States acquired a continent and then a world role.

Nicholls builds the book on a single distinction: race has held Haitians together, color has driven them apart. An awareness of shared racial identity, present from the earliest years, gave successive generations a stubborn commitment to national independence; color worked the other way, as rival factions repeatedly preferred foreign intervention to letting their opponents govern, and effective independence was worn away in the process.

He is careful about what the thesis does not claim. Race and color are not offered as the only forces at work, nor as reducible to economics; the chapters that follow tie them instead to class, to international relations, to religious and cultural movements, and to regional and personal loyalty, while granting that their prominence at any given moment tracks the economic conditions of that moment.

The preface carries the account past Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, through the junta, the handling of former macoutes and Colonel Regala's ascendancy, to conclude that Duvalierism outlived the Duvaliers.

Historiography, as this book defines it, is the critical study of how historians go about reconstructing past events, as opposed to the statements they end up making. The term also names the history of history itself, and the shifting interpretations of any particular subject; it is the first, most general sense that is pursued here.

The starting point is that in most languages one word covers both what happened and the accounts we give of it. A library's history shelves hold books about the past rather than the past itself, and frequently books that tell incompatible stories about the same events.

From there the book surveys historical thinking from the earliest surviving narratives of Greece and China to the twenty-first century, closes with present-day debates and the new media reshaping how research is circulated, and adds a chapter on the training and career paths open to those who decide to make a profession of it.

Lee covers Singapore's first three decades after the separation from Malaysia in 1965, a small country left without a hinterland, working against long odds. He dates the anxiety precisely: relief in 1971, when enough jobs existed to absorb the British military withdrawal, and confidence only after the island came through the oil shock of 1973.

Numbers frame the story. Income per head stood at four hundred dollars when he took office in 1959, more than twelve thousand when he stepped down in 1990, and twenty-two thousand by the end of the 1990s. Alignment with the West during the Cold War, he notes, brought both regional solidarity and backing from the Americans, Western Europeans and Japanese.

He is careful about what the book is not. It offers no formula for building an economy or a nation, only the problems he and his colleagues faced and how they solved them, arranged by theme rather than by year.

A technical manual explaining how USAID builds its annual Country Roadmaps, the scorecards it publishes for every low- and middle-income country it works with.

Two dimensions organise the exercise. Commitment covers what a country's laws, policies and informal norms actually do — open and accountable governance, inclusive development across gender and social groups, and economic policy. Capacity covers what it can deliver: government effectiveness, tax collection, safety and security, the strength of civil society and free media, the condition of citizens, and the productivity of the economy. Eighteen primary metrics carry the weight, eight on commitment and ten on capacity, with further secondary measures behind them.

For each metric the guide names the definition, the outside data source, and the place it occupies in the framework. Closing sections document the arithmetic: normalisation, aggregation, the time periods covered, what is done about missing data, and which countries are included.

Written jointly by an anthropologist and a Haitian-born scholar who met when he walked into her office to tell her that her dissertation had it wrong -- Haitians, he said, never stop thinking about Haiti -- this book grows out of a 1996 trip and 109 interviews, most of them with people who had little money and no power.

Its subject is what the authors call long-distance nationalism: an ideology that keeps a territorial homeland and its state at the centre while refusing to let borders settle who belongs to the nation. Emigrants, their children and those who stayed behind are bound into a single transborder citizenry, justified by talk of shared descent and blood, and it produces actions rather than only sentiment.

Haiti supplies the case. Remittances prop up the economy; Aristide named the diaspora a tenth department and created a ministry for Haitians abroad, while American opinion still expects immigrants to pick one country.

Library organizations around the world moved quickly after the January 2010 earthquake. The American Library Association raised funds at its Midwinter Meeting in Boston, created a relief fund for rebuilding the country's libraries and archives, and began coordinating with the Blue Shield committee, IFLA and UNESCO. Its Black Caucus opened a separate fund channelled to relief agencies.

Much of the account concerns the Digital Library of the Caribbean, run out of Florida International University, which launched an initiative aimed at the National Archives and the country's three biggest heritage libraries. The buildings were standing but damaged, one of them likely to be demolished, and staff asked first for gloves, masks, archival boxes and temporary help, with shelving, equipment and conservation work to follow. The National Library came through with its shelving and holdings shifted.

Speaking with Rowell after the flooding of New Orleans, Hall explains why she once described the city as the most African in America. Africans reached Louisiana in a compact mass before 1731, two-thirds of them from Senegambia, and their languages, religion, cooking and music shaped the colony during its formative years; Louisiana Creole was made by that first generation and their children.

She resists the habit of crediting Caribbean or Haitian influence for what Louisiana made itself, noting that the Creole spoken there is a separate language from Haiti's, that voodoo in Louisiana was led by women rather than men, and that Marie Laveau's ancestry turns out to be entirely local.

Asked why televised images of the Superdome struck other Americans as foreign, she answers twice over: culturally, in the French names and the musicality of speech; politically, in a pattern of governing a hard-to-control population through repression, corruption, mass incarceration and the deliberate encouragement of division by color.

Logan treats the two states sharing Hispaniola as a single problem. He opens with the physical island - the gap between temperatures at Furcy and at sea level in Port-au-Prince, the short and irregular rivers, the Artibonite that floods and then dwindles, the porous limestone that stores no water and the deforestation that has made run-off worse.

He turns then to the people, setting out how conquest and slavery produced the island's population and the vocabulary of mixture attached to it, and why the near-total disappearance of the Taino, together with the small number of Spanish settlers, left Santo Domingo less Hispanicized and less severe about color than the mainland colonies.

The history that follows is one of entanglement and outside pressure: Toussaint's constitution claiming the whole island, later cited by Haitian rulers as warrant for repeated invasions; the French withdrawal of 1809; and the American customs receivership, which by 1912 had marines ashore and Washington choosing Dominican presidents.

Danticat edited this volume for Akashic's Noir series, which assigns each contributor a specific neighborhood or locale and had reached its thirty-sixth city with Haiti. The stories are new work, from Haitian writers including Gary Victor, Kettly Mars and Yanick Lahens along with others based in the diaspora and two foreign writers on Haiti.

In her introduction Danticat records that the project began roughly a year before the earthquake of 12 January 2010, which caused over two hundred thousand deaths and left more than a million people homeless in the capital and in Léogâne, Petit-Goâve and Jacmel; she was writing while survivors were still in makeshift camps. Hardship, she notes, predated the disaster, and so did the humor and invention Haitians have long put into painting, music and fiction, including its darker registers.

Dayan begins from a reversal. Rather than reading Haiti through the French revolution, she reads the revolution from Haitian ground, where the promise of liberty and equality met the hard facts of property, labour and race. The stories of Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines have been told and retold in Haiti itself, and they conflict according to who is telling them and to what end; Dayan turns away from mainstream historical accounts toward what Haitians wrote about themselves.

Much of the book dwells on figures who were either idealized or brutalized, and on scenes where illicit identities surface: Rochambeau inheriting Toussaint's household of women, the woman known as Defilee gathering up the pieces of Dessalines's body, Ezili as a spirit of love who forbids it, among others.

Underlying the reconstruction is vodou, taken not as exotica but, following a remark of Sidney Mintz that stayed with her, as a set of postulates about reality.

Commissioned for the United Nations Secretary-General, Collier's report contends that Haiti's economic prospects are far better than its standing among so-called fragile states suggests. He points to a calm and prosperous neighbourhood, the absence of ethnic division or an armed opposition, a large and politically effective diaspora in North America, wage costs competitive with China's, proximity to the American market, and nine years of guaranteed duty-free access under HOPE II.

What is missing, on this account, is not potential but a strategy. Donors have treated strategy as the government's business alone, yet capacity is thin and the decisive levers sit with donors, the Security Council, parliament and investors, so commitments have to be made together rather than in sequence.

Collier proposes a deliberately narrow programme organised around employment, basic services, food supply and the environment, with quick results credited to Haitians. Urgency comes from the shocks of 2008 and from the fixed horizons of MINUSTAH and HOPE II.

Rhodes reads the Georgia Gazette straight through from 1763 to 1799, along with papers in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New York, London and Paris, and pulls out 123 items concerning Haitians. From them she reconstructs both an episode and the way it was reported.

The episode is the siege of Savannah in 1779, where men of colour from Saint-Domingue fought under d'Estaing beside American troops, and where several future leaders of Haitian independence got their first experience of war. White historians, she notes, have mostly passed over their part while Black historians have magnified it, and she treats the silence and the celebration as two forms of the same distortion.

She also traces what a partisan, Tory-controlled press chose to print and to withhold about Black soldiers and, later, about the revolution in the colony — an anxiety that resurfaces in the Charleston conspiracy trials of 1822.

Mocombe sets out to name and codify a philosophical system he finds already embedded in Vodou practice, calling it Haitian or Vilokan idealism. On his reading the cosmos is a single material universe made by Bondye out of itself, doubled into a profane world and a mirrored sacred one where the lwa exist as real concepts, ideals and skills reached through dreams, divination, trance, reason or ordinary experience.

He treats this as a form of transcendental idealism close to Kant's but departing from it at two points: the noumenal realm is knowable rather than sealed off, and the categories of understanding are supplemented by dream and trance states. Out of it he derives a hermeneutic phenomenology, a materialism, an antidialectics in which each person contends against everyone else's interpretation, and an ethic of reciprocal justice.

Later chapters follow these commitments through the revolution, the lakou and Haitian aesthetics, and argue that Haiti's metaphysics has outrun its sciences.

Anglophone scholarship on Haiti has expanded sharply, driven by Atlantic and world history and by interest in race, colonialism and migration, while inside Haiti historical work revived once the Duvalier regime and its persecution of intellectuals ended. Sepinwall's premise is that the growth is itself an obstacle: the work is scattered across so many disciplines and journals that even specialists lose track, and newcomers have had no obvious entry point.

The volume reprints fifteen recent articles in three sections, running from colonial Saint-Domingue through the nineteenth century to the occupation, the second independence of 1934 and the earthquake of 2010. Each section opens with an essay giving background, previewing the readings, surveying the surrounding historiography and marking out where research is still needed, and closes with a reading list. Sepinwall is pointed about the gulf between Anglophone and Haitian scholarship, noting how much work by Haitian historians remains untranslated and correspondingly little cited abroad.

Geggus's studies of the Haitian Revolution begin by reconstructing the society that produced it. On the eve of 1789 Saint Domingue held some eight thousand estates and accounted for something near two-fifths of all French trade abroad, with a population of about 500,000 slaves, 40,000 whites and 30,000 free people of colour.

Each of those groups, he shows, was split from within. Planters quarrelled with merchants and with the turbulent petits blancs; the gens de couleur ranged from newly freed Africans to educated landowners, bound together only by legal disability; the enslaved majority was divided by birthplace, language and rank, with Kongolese the largest African contingent. By comparative standards, he notes, the colony's slaves rebelled remarkably little.

A further study surveys where the evidence lies: French and colonial archives, published inquiries such as the Débats of 1792–94, and the personal records generated when insurgents went into exile.

Drawing on fieldwork in the Marbial valley above Jacmel, Bastien describes how Haitian peasant families were actually organized, and how the arrangement was coming apart. His starting unit is the lakou, a cluster of huts on undivided family land, each household farming its own plot, presided over by a met whose authority is real over sons and largely ceremonial over cousins.

Land holds the arrangement together and also destroys it. A father parcels his holdings informally among his children, daughters included; at his death, vague boundaries, unrecognized heirs and defective titles produce lawsuits that break families, and the costs push peasants off the very land they fought to keep. Each lakou has its own graveyard and its inherited spirits, so the ground is ancestral as much as economic.

Bastien reads the resulting fragmentation, alongside erosion and population growth, as the setting for Haiti's agricultural crisis.

Geggus asks why vodou, alone among the neo-African religions of the Americas, became the faith of a national majority, and finds the answer in an unusual combination of circumstances.

Africans made up well over half the non-white population of Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, and nothing much stood against them: after the Jesuits were expelled in the 1760s, and through the long rupture with Rome that lasted until 1860, efforts to christianise the rural population were slight. Yet baptism and priests kept their prestige, and many Central African captives arrived already carrying some Christianity from Portuguese and Italian missions, which made the fusing of Catholic ritual with African rites easier than a simple model of acculturation allows.

Turning to the colonial record, he works chiefly from Moreau de Saint-Méry's account of a snake cult in the west province, associated with Aja-Fon captives the colonists called Arada, and follows its vocabulary and its serpent deity back toward Whydah.

Taking up Trouillot's claim that the Haitian Revolution could not be thought at the moment it occurred, the editors move the argument from historiography into language. If the concepts adequate to the event were still being invented alongside it, its silencing was structural rather than merely retrospective — and literature, poised at the edge of the believable, becomes a privileged place to watch that pressure register.

They read Article Fourteen of the 1805 constitution, declaring all Haitians Black regardless of origin, as exactly such an invention: a performative act that collapses the classification it borrows from and turns an as-if into a promise still outstanding. Following Trouillot, they warn against letting uniqueness harden into exceptionalism.

The second thread is disciplinary. Romanticism has absorbed the French Revolution at length while treating Haiti as an afterthought. The volume asks what changes when Haiti enters not as subject matter but as an event in the history of Romanticism itself.

Bouchereau's 1957 study reads the position of women in Haiti as a sequence of cultural inheritances. It opens before the conquest, drawing on Las Casas, Oviedo and Charlevoix to describe a Taino order in which chieftaincies could pass through sisters and women held villages and whole cacicats — Anacaona, poet, queen and stateswoman, being the figure Haitian historiography has kept.

The second layer is African. Since the captives shipped from Senegal to Mozambique became the island's majority, she sketches women's roles in West and Central Africa before turning to the French colony, where the first women sent from France were drawn from prisons and the streets of Paris, and where women helped lead the 1722 revolt at Le Cap against the Compagnie des Indes.

The Haitian period begins in ruins. Slavery, she argues, had shattered clan and family organisation and made women objects of passing pleasure; Dessalines then had to legislate a social order largely out of metropolitan remnants.

Zephaniah Kingsley — merchant, slaveowner, slave trader — spent the revolutionary decades in motion around the Atlantic. Fleszar uses that itinerary to track a worldview taking shape and then breaking apart.

Enlightenment thinkers had worried about what happened when boundaries were crossed, real or imagined, picturing the ocean as a brutal space full of shape-shifters who answered to nothing but profit. Kingsley's life supplies the case. The process began, Fleszar argues, with what he paid for staying loyal to the British Crown as an idea, and was then worked on by the violence, mobility, anxiety and constant adaptation of booming Caribbean markets during the Haitian Revolution.

Following how he manipulated identity and race does more than catalogue the masks of his self-invention; it brings into view how deeply power was structured across the Atlantic.

A reference volume for English-speaking readers approaching Haiti, built to be consulted rather than read through. Entries are deliberately brief: enough to make sense of a name or term met elsewhere, with a bibliography and bibliographical essay at the back for anyone who wants to pursue it.

Coverage reaches from geography and population to political and governmental history, and on to culture and social welfare. Perusse describes a country whose survival under punishing conditions he finds remarkable, and a culture mixing African and French elements through speech, worship, custom and art, supplying colour and invention in the middle of poverty.

The editorial choices are stated plainly. Because the audience is anglophone, the English headword normally leads, with the French, Spanish or Creole term cross-referenced to it; words that translate awkwardly, or that English has already absorbed, keep their original form, usually with the definite article dropped.

A statistical portrait of Boston's Haitian-born population, issued by the city as part of a series on its immigrant communities. It dates the community's origins to Haitians fleeing the Duvalier regime from the late 1950s, and locates present-day settlement in Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester and Hyde Park, with movement outward to the South Shore and to Lawrence, Lowell and Worcester.

Census figures give roughly 18,900 Haitian-born residents in the city, the largest single immigrant group at a tenth of the foreign-born total. The profile covers age, marriage, naturalisation, schooling, occupation, labour-force participation and self-employment, measuring Haitians throughout against all foreign-born and all native-born residents.

Two results stand out. Attainment at the high-school level matches or exceeds both comparison groups while degree-holding lags far behind them. And a fifth of Haitian workers hold health-care support jobs, most of them registered nurses, four times the share among other immigrants and ten times that of the native-born.

Frost sets out to teach statistical reasoning to readers who mostly encounter numbers and charts produced by someone else and want to judge whether they can be trusted, and he does it with explanation rather than formal derivation.

An opening section pits statistical evidence against anecdote, using a weight-loss supplement to show why testimonials mislead: the people whose results were unremarkable never come forward, and a self-selected sample tells you nothing about anyone else. Observational studies, which measure many relevant variables and model the contribution of each, are distinguished from randomized controlled trials, which alone support causal conclusions.

The book then splits in two. The first half covers working tools — kinds of data, quantitative and categorical, continuous and discrete; histograms, boxplots and contingency tables, with cautions about how each can mislead; central tendency, variability, percentiles and correlation; and probability distributions, dwelling on the normal curve and standard scores. The second turns to inference from sample to population.

Luhmann opens his lecture course by telling a sociology audience that their discipline is in theoretical crisis. It keeps circling back to Weber, Marx, Simmel and Durkheim, has some middle-range theories drawn from empirical work, and has almost nothing to say about ecological problems or the therapeutic demands of modern life. The interesting developments, he suggests, are happening outside the field.

The lectures therefore begin with the structural and maintenance functionalism of American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, and with Parsons, showing where each ran up against its limits and why the ideological criticism of the late 1960s was enough to shut the programme down. He then turns to mathematics, biology, cybernetics and epistemology for concepts sociology might borrow.

Chief among them is autopoiesis, detached from its biological origins so it can describe self-reproducing social systems, whose closure and openness condition one another and which keep human beings in their environment rather than inside them.

Bongie takes Glissant's proposition that the world is creolizing as his point of departure, opening with a passage from Carpentier in which the Americas appear as a place of mixture and identity rests on migratory routes rather than roots.

He then argues against himself. Exclusionary, essentialist thinking cannot simply be got past; assertions of fixed identity are unavoidable, and even the affirmation of a creole identity betrays the endless transformation it claims to name. Demystifying identity is a necessary tactic but not a sufficient one, and the most fervent demystifiers tend to repeat the very gesture they attack.

The readings alternate between colonial and postcolonial writing: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's island pastoral, Hugo's reactionary retelling of the Haitian Revolution and its hostility to people of mixed race, a little-known Martiniquan novel read beside the journalism of Cyrille Bissette, and two novels of 1987 by Glissant and Daniel Maximin.