Rich and Jean-Charles survey mental health and the psychological professions in Haiti, opening with a compact portrait of the country: its racial and ethnic groups, its population and cities, and a history carrying both proud heritage and present standing as the hemisphere's poorest nation. Religion gets its own treatment — Catholic and Protestant Christianity alongside Vodou — as do crime, poverty, joblessness, substance misuse, and the weight of the 2010 earthquake and other disasters.

The chapter then follows behavioral health services from their origins to the current state of mental hospitals and psychiatric units, dwelling on how few psychiatrists, doctoral psychologists, and master's-level social workers there are, while noting growth in formal training programs and the stigma that still attaches to seeking care.

Considerable space goes to traditional healing, which matters most in rural areas where clinicians are hard to reach: the varieties of healer, and conditions bound to or shaped by culture. A closing section weighs challenges against opportunities.

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.

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

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

Gosse's premise is that racial and economic motives were not rivals but partners. Any serious study of racism in the Americas, on this account, has to begin with the European setting the British came out of, not with the colonies themselves.

Much of the discussion traces where European racial thinking originated. Gosse takes up William Green's suggestion that the British may have held Africans in contempt before ever reaching the New World, and turns to Portugal, the first European country with a sizeable West African population by the end of the fifteenth century, where Africa below the Sahara was imagined as a place of monsters and where non-Portuguese residents were confined to physical labour and judged inferior for it.

The resulting ideology assigns everyone a rung and demands compliance with it, reserving the top for supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon blood and casting white rule over the enslaved as a duty laid down by nature.