Campbell builds an essay around one odd episode — crabs swarming ashore — in Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo of 1808. The reading follows the crustacean backward into eighteenth-century natural history, where writers on the natural world had already loaded the animal with meaning about slavery, and specifically about the threat that enslaved people were thought to pose to European colonization.

Taken as an emblem rather than a stray detail, the swarm lets Sansay do two things at once: register American alarm at the Haitian Revolution and take the edge off that alarm by rendering it in the cool, classifying idiom of science.

Campbell treats the episode as evidence for a wider claim about the period's fiction — that political commentary often sits inside borrowed scientific description, and that early American literary study has something to gain from reading natural history alongside the novels.

Isaac Sasportas was born in French Saint-Domingue around 1779, into the Sephardic Diaspora. Girard follows him to Charleston, where between 1793 and 1795 he lived with his uncle Abraham, a man caught up both in the American Revolution and in the political battles of the French one.

The nephew adopted the uncle's radicalism and carried it home. Back in Saint-Domingue he became a leading planner of an invasion of Jamaica, then British, meant to free the enslaved Africans there. Toussaint Louverture disclosed the plan, and Sasportas was executed in Jamaica in December 1799.

Leonora Sansay went to Saint-Domingue in 1802 with her husband, a planter attempting to recover the estate he had abandoned, and published her letters to Aaron Burr six years later as an epistolary novel. Accilien reads that book as a record of how a Western outsider tried to make sense of a revolution for which, as Trouillot put it, European thought had no frame of reference.

The reading attends closely to the machinery of the form. Sansay divides herself between a narrator, Mary, who writes the letters, and a protagonist, Clara, whose story they tell — a distance that lets the account pass as mere observation. What emerges is a picture of how whites, free people of color and the enslaved stood toward one another in the colony's last months, and of French complacency as the war closed in. Accilien ends on Sansay's nostalgia and her unresolved position on slavery.

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.

Sweet's research note opens not with Kongo but with a French colonist. Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières landed at Norfolk, Virginia, on February 26, 1794, after a four-month crossing from Le Havre that began in a storm and never improved.

Worse had come earlier. Two years before, with the revolution just under way, Baudry found his wife and daughter wandering in the woods of Saint-Domingue, driven from their home by rebels. He was an officer, wounded near Léogane, and most of the men under his command were killed. He fled the colony in March 1792, met briefly in Paris with his brother-in-law, the writer Moreau de Saint-Méry, and was soon exiled again, settling in Philadelphia.

There he worked as clerk, bookseller, and editor. He traveled North America, spent time with relatives in New Orleans, and recast himself as an authority on the natural history of the French colonies, lecturing to the American Philosophical Society and publishing on scientific subjects.

Ciccariello-Maher begins with Susan Buck-Morss's influential treatment of Hegel and Haiti, then pushes past it toward larger questions about dialectics and the universal that the Haitian Revolution forces open.

Reading with C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins in hand, he identifies what he calls ironic silences in her argument. Chief among them is the near-absence of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who succeeded Toussaint, and whom Ciccariello-Maher restores to the center of the account. Along with that restoration comes a claim about method: struggles fought in the name of particular identities are not obstacles to the universal but part of how it gets made.

The final move brings in Frantz Fanon, whose rewriting of Hegel's master-slave relation drops out of Buck-Morss's account entirely. Taken up as a corrective, Fanon allows the question of progress toward the universal to be posed again in dialectical terms that have been decolonized.

Haitian independence reverberated among Africans across the Atlantic world, and Barima traces one channel of that influence: Jamaica in the decades on either side of the revolution.

The starting condition matters to the argument. Maroon polities in Jamaica had signed treaties with the colonial establishment in 1739 and 1740, a serious setback for the fight against slavery there. Events in Haiti revived that fight, Barima contends, feeding marronage, conspiracies, and open revolt through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The study examines how Jamaica's Africans and Afro-Creoles mirrored what was happening in Haiti while carrying forward West and Central African culture and spirituality as part of the campaign for freedom. Revisiting this political and religious terrain, Barima argues, brings into view earlier answers to the same summons the captives had raised.

Two black newspapers in New York City, Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, carried out what Yingling identifies as one of the earliest sustained racial projects in the United States, across the years from 1827 to 1841.

Facing constant slander aimed at black Americans, the editors set about redefining who their readers were within the Black Atlantic, moving away from an idea of a shared African past that was losing its hold. Freedom's Journal put the Haitian Revolution to work as proof of resistance, of the abolitionist case, and of self-rule.

The Colored American, coming later, made different use of the same country. It held up the Republic of Haiti as an example of sound government, prosperity, and refinement, a portrait fitted to that community's own growing claims on citizenship, inclusion, and rights.

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.

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.