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.

A documentary reader built around primary sources from colonial Saint-Domingue and the revolution that destroyed it. Geggus supplies the editorial introductions and a compact narrative account of the revolt itself, so that the documents arrive with enough context to be read on their own terms.

Much of the material had not appeared in print before. Geggus gathered it from archives on both sides of the Atlantic and translated it for this edition, including sources on the conditions that pushed enslaved people and free people of color toward revolt in 1791.

The volume is pitched at readers meeting the subject for the first time as well as at those already working on it.

Walsh reads Toussaint Louverture and Aime Cesaire together, using their writings to ask how each understood and recounted a defining moment in the decolonizing of the French Caribbean. For Louverture that moment is the revolution that freed the colony of Saint-Domingue; for Cesaire it is the 1946 departmentalization that folded Martinique and other colonies into France itself.

Setting the two side by side lets Walsh trace what connects them. Emancipation left distinct legacies in each case, and those legacies were carried forward in narratives of revolution and nationhood that later generations inherited.

By revisiting both figures through the several layers of narrative they left behind, the book arrives at an account of what it has meant, historically and in the present, to be free and French in the Caribbean.

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.

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.

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.