Screen portrayals of the Haitian Revolution are Sepinwall's subject, among them Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and the earlier rebel Makandal.

Part of the chapter is about money. Sepinwall asks why certain stories from Black history never reach the screen at all, and locates an answer in how film funding is distributed — a pattern she ties to the trouble former slaveholding nations, the United States and France in particular, have had in confronting slavery.

She then turns to video games, which she treats as an increasingly powerful force in shaping what the public remembers of the past. Games set during the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue already exist, and the chapter's claim is that they deserve study on the same footing as anything on film.

Sepinwall asks what place C. L. R. James's 1938 study still holds among specialists in the Haitian Revolution, at a moment when the book is being rediscovered by Caribbean theorists, British readers on the left, and even American venture capitalists. Its long dominance, she suggests, was less a compliment to James than an indictment of a field Anglophone historians had largely abandoned.

Tracing the book's early reception and then setting it against work published since the 1990s, she finds a mixed inheritance. Scholars still credit James with insisting that the enslaved freed themselves, and one of them was pushed toward the study of ordinary insurgents by James himself. But newer research in notarial and court records has complicated his portraits of free people of color, his weighting of class over race, and his near-silence on women. The field, on her account, no longer needs a single book to stand in for it.

Anglophone scholarship on Haiti has expanded sharply, driven by Atlantic and world history and by interest in race, colonialism and migration, while inside Haiti historical work revived once the Duvalier regime and its persecution of intellectuals ended. Sepinwall's premise is that the growth is itself an obstacle: the work is scattered across so many disciplines and journals that even specialists lose track, and newcomers have had no obvious entry point.

The volume reprints fifteen recent articles in three sections, running from colonial Saint-Domingue through the nineteenth century to the occupation, the second independence of 1934 and the earthquake of 2010. Each section opens with an essay giving background, previewing the readings, surveying the surrounding historiography and marking out where research is still needed, and closes with a reading list. Sepinwall is pointed about the gulf between Anglophone and Haitian scholarship, noting how much work by Haitian historians remains untranslated and correspondingly little cited abroad.