La Revue du Monde Noir prints an article on Black art worldwide

In March 1932 the Paris journal La Revue du Monde Noir carried an article by Georges Hardy on what Black artists across the world had contributed. The journal was short lived and it mattered out of all proportion to its run. It appeared in French and English, which let Haitian writers, African American writers and Africans living in Paris read one another without a translator standing in between. That readership is what an article of this kind served. It presented a body of Black artistic achievement as a single subject rather than as a set of local curiosities, and it fed a sense of racial pride among an international group of intellectuals who had until then been working inside separate national conversations. For Haitians, whose country was under American military occupation, the journal supplied evidence that their own indigenist argument belonged to something larger. Ideas that later hardened into political movements were circulating first as literary criticism.

Sténio Vincent visited Washington in the spring of 1934 and was received at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt returned the call on 5 July, coming ashore from the USS Houston at Cap Haïtien in heat near a hundred degrees and walking the wharf on legs that polio had taken most of the use of. The two presidents drove through crowds to the Union Club and agreed a memorandum whose main effect was that the marines would be gone by the middle of August. On 1 August, in front of Vincent, the cabinet and ten thousand people on the Champ de Mars, Colonel Démosthènes Calixte took command of the Garde d'Haïti from Colonel Vogel. On 14 August the American flag came down at brigade headquarters, twenty one guns sounded from Fort National, then twenty one more while the Dessalinienne played and the Haitian flag went up. The Americans left their weapons and equipment behind. Next morning the marines marched to the transports.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated president of the United States thirty three days later, on 4 March. By 1932 some thirteen million Americans were out of work, one in four of those able and willing, and because most married women were kept out of paid work by custom, every fourth household had no earner at all. Roosevelt had been elected on a platform promising a new deal for the American people. He held office for twelve years and was elected four times, a record the Twenty Second Amendment made impossible for anyone after him. Kennedy's argument is that the two terms cannot be read apart. The Hundred Days, the reforms of 1934 and 1935, the fight over the Supreme Court in 1937 and the long argument about isolation all played out against the German dictatorship.