A million Algerians die and France leaves in July 1962

The Algerian war entered its worst phase in 1956 with bombings in Algiers and a French army doubled to around half a million men. Ahmed Ben Bella, who had escaped from prison, organised the FLN abroad and kept the weapons moving, with Nasser's Egypt as the important ally. The fighting in Algiers through 1956 and 1957 was savage on both sides. Negotiations failed, and French settlers made their own attempts to seize the colonial administration. De Gaulle's offensives at the end of the decade destroyed a great deal and settled nothing, while opposition to the war grew inside France. In 1960 the United Nations recognised Algeria's right to self determination. After more failed talks and more atrocities the French withdrew in July 1962 and independence was recognised. Up to a million European settlers left with the administration, having lost about ten thousand dead. Algerian dead numbered a million or more. Frantz Fanon wrote Les Damnes de la Terre out of this war.

The election of 22 September 1957 was held under the supervision of the military junta commanded by Antonio Kebreau. Francois Duvalier took more than 679,000 votes. Louis Dejoie took roughly 266,000. What began that day was the conversion of the Haitian state into a totalitarian machine built around one man, and a doctrine that shifted power toward the black middle class in the name of a new equilibrium. Trouillot refuses to treat the outcome as an accident or as something imposed from outside. He puts it inside a long structural quarrel between the people who staffed the state and the nation the state was supposed to serve, a quarrel older than any of the candidates. Duvalierism was one answer to that quarrel, and its answer was to make the state the only actor left standing. The vote count is the least interesting number here. The structure that produced the count had been assembling for a century and a half.

Haitians reaching New York in the 1960s found no government or civic body set up to receive them. The Catholic Church filled the space, sponsoring centres that offered help with employment, immigration paperwork, housing, literacy and English classes. Lyderick Bonaventure, a trade union leader and political activist pushed out of Haiti, founded and directed one of the first of them in 1967. The Haitian Neighborhood Center, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, became a place immigrants went for counselling, for news from home, or simply to meet other Haitians. Similar centres followed in Brooklyn and Queens, among them Charlemagne Peralte and Haitian Americans United for Progress. The people running them were educated, comfortable in American institutions, and had generally held prominent positions in Haiti before the Duvalier government forced them out of the country.

Independence across Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States produced, from the late 1950s, a large expansion of scholarly work on the African past. Historians, linguists and archaeologists filled in centuries that university syllabuses had treated as empty, and African history became a subject many universities offer. Offering is a different thing from requiring. In world history courses the African material tends to sit in a sidebar or in a chapter that gets dropped when the term runs short, few history students take an African course at all, and the courses that exist give most of their attention to the last two or three centuries while the ancient periods stay thin. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the same arithmetic applies to us. Haiti is available to be studied and almost never required, so a person can finish a history degree in the country that bought Louisiana from Napoleon without being told why Napoleon was in a hurry to sell it.