Price-Mars asks how one island came to hold two countries

In January 1939 Jean Price-Mars published a study in the review of the Societe d'Histoire on Haitian diplomacy and the independence of the Dominican Republic. He worked through the reasons the island ended up carrying two states, tracing the decisions that made the division permanent. The timing gives the piece its weight. Fifteen months earlier, in October 1937, Dominican soldiers acting on Rafael Trujillo's orders had killed thousands of Haitians living along the border, and the two governments had closed the matter with an indemnity that was negotiated down and barely paid. Haiti had no means of compelling anything. Price-Mars went back to the diplomacy instead, to the treaties and boundary agreements that had produced a frontier the two states never stopped arguing over. A historian who answers a massacre with a study of how the border was drawn is making a claim about where the trouble started.

A man in the Kenscoff mountains who was already legally married could not easily register as his own the children he had by a plase wife. If he was well known in his own commune he might travel to another one to do it. Where he did nothing, the mother's father would commonly declare the child as his own by an invented woman. If the grandfather was dead, or the mother was over thirty and had been settled with a man for some years, she could register the birth herself, and the child was entered as born of an unknown father. In the bourg of Kenscoff between 1934 and 1956 there were forty eight such registrations, made by forty mothers. Twenty three of them concerned a woman who had been living with the child's father for between five and twenty four years. Ten of the children had no siblings. Three were made legitimate later when their parents married.

When the final contingent left Haitian soil, the association's twenty-fifth annual report recalled its own part in moving American opinion against the occupation and described itself as the leading organisation in the United States campaigning both for evacuation and for an end to American banking control of Haitian finances. Pamphile is careful about the balance sheet. The concentrated NAACP effort of the early 1920s did not end the occupation; the Harding administration instead rationalised and strengthened it, even while Harding withdrew marines from Camaguey in Cuba in 1922. What the association sustained afterwards was pressure: mass meetings, distribution of information across the United States, and appeals by staff to Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt and to individual senators. Pamphile closes by calling this work for human dignity in the first Black republic a little known part of the organisation's history.

Comhaire-Sylvain set out in 1939 to find what girls in Port-au-Prince did with their free hours. The premise was that unaccounted time was a danger, that a girl whose day could not be reconstructed might be doing something that would cost her a reputation, and that such time therefore needed watching. The survey found something else. A large share of the girls she interviewed were servants in the houses of the well off, and they were working more than ninety eight hours a week. A small number were enrolled as full time pupils. Most were part time, and of those, many missed classes often. There was almost no free time left to investigate. The ninety eight hour week belonged to children who appeared on the rolls as students, and the houses that employed them were the houses of the women who would read the report.