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.

How Haitians have commemorated their own founding is, Zavitz argues, a subject no one had studied at length. Her dissertation supplies the first extended interdisciplinary account, running from independence to the present and drawing on national holidays, historiography, literature, oral tradition and interviews conducted in Port-au-Prince.

Following Trouillot on how silences are produced, she looks for what commemoration omits as much as what it asserts, and for the counter-memories that press against the narratives of the powerful, reshaping them over time. The first of January 1804 anchors the account: she traces a century of Independence Day observance and the making of Dessalines as its presiding figure, showing officials drawing on symbols from France, Africa and the Americas.

Later chapters follow the rival mulâtriste and noiriste legends through Haitian letters, and the successive waves of indigénisme that brought the peasantry, Kreyòl and Vodou into a contest over who made the nation.

Belony's doctoral thesis follows how Haitians in Quebec have spoken about and remembered Duvalierism, and finds no straight line running through that record.

Competing accounts of what Duvalierist power was, and where it belongs in Haiti's national story, have been argued over within the diaspora, and the arguments have shifted as political conditions changed on both sides — in Haiti and in Quebec. The thesis ends on a claim about interpretation itself: whether a given reading of Duvalierism comes out favourable or damning, it is always anchored in some wider judgment about what Haiti has become since 1986.