American newspapers describe Haiti as failed, and as the poorest country in the hemisphere, laying its troubles at its own door while saying little of the outside forces that helped produce them. Potter tests that pattern empirically.

The approach is critical geopolitics, applied to a single year of coverage: everything five leading U.S. papers ran in 2004, examined for the vocabulary applied to the country and for the frames that vocabulary builds up.

Behind the method sits a line of criticism showing that how a place is represented can settle what counts as common sense about it, and can make social inequality look warranted. Potter's stated hope is that naming these images opens the way to rethinking how Haiti is popularly seen, and to a different conversation about it, one large enough to hold the whole country's story. Only then, the argument goes, can its problems be addressed.

Shannon sets Price-Mars's formation against the conditions that brought American marines ashore in 1915. Haiti entered the century cut off from the world economy, its elite French in language, religion and schooling, its debt held in Paris, its commerce passing into German and Levantine hands, with foreign businessmen financing the coups that kept turning the presidency over.

The turn in Price-Mars's own thinking came from reading Gustave Le Bon, who sorted human races by psychological traits held to be fixed by heredity and beyond the reach of education. That a people could be written off in advance struck him as an insolence refuted by fourteen years of revolutionary war, and he resolved to answer it.

The occupation supplied the occasion. Shannon follows Caperton's landing and his assumption of governing authority over a country with no institution able to refuse him, then turns to Price-Mars's early efforts to organize Haitians in response.