Reviewing three recent works on Haiti and the early United States — Dun's Dangerous Neighbors, Dillon and Drexler's essay collection, and Daut's Tropics of Haiti — Stieber notes that all three answer Trouillot's call to unsilence Saint-Domingue, and all three complicate it. Far from unthinkable, the revolution was narrated constantly, and in racialized terms, in Philadelphia newspapers and across the Atlantic print world.

Her sharper point concerns method. Silencing the Past deserves reading whole, she argues, rather than being mined for its chapter on Atlantic silences: the book widens outward from disputes internal to Haitian historiography to the framing of Columbus's landfall. The trouble is that the Haitian detail becomes imperceptible as the frame widens, and comparative scholarship risks reproducing that flattening. Her proposed remedy is to bring the work done in Haiti — journals, monographs, the Haitian press — properly into view.

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.