An earthquake kills fourteen members of Haiti's only LGBT group

SEROvie was the only organisation in Haiti that worked solely with gay and bisexual men and with transgender women. The earthquake of 12 January 2010 killed fourteen of its members at once. Seven died when the SEROvie building collapsed to its foundations, and the director, Reginald Dupont, pulled the dead, the dying and the injured out of the wreckage. The group stopped arguing about gender and sexuality as identities and turned to relief. Its staff handed out food and medicine in Port-au-Prince, searched the camps thrown up for the displaced, and restarted operations in five regions, the North, the West, the Southeast, the Artibonite and the South. Many of the people it served had lost their homes, their papers and members of their families. The same shock brought down Vodou peristyles across the country, among them the temple of the houngan Max Beauvoir, who complained that aid reached his followers slowly and said he hoped the disaster might yet pull Haitians together.

Human rights organisations inside and outside the Dominican Republic argued that stripping citizenship by circular contradicted the constitution itself. In 2010 the country adopted a new constitution which says that children of foreigners in transit or living illegally in the territory are not citizens by birth. The founding document was thereby brought into line with the migration law of 2004 and with what registry offices had already been doing. The same constitution created a Constitutional Court of thirteen judges charged with enforcing constitutional justice. Because the audit of the civil registry ran backwards, a birth recorded in 1983 could be suspended under a rule written in 2010, and the government also kept the Book of Foreigners for Dominicans of Haitian descent who could not prove their parents were legally resident. Generations of children born in the country are entered in it at birth.

Johnson assembled fifteen printed world history textbooks with editions published across a five year window, gathering the information through scholars on social media. One contained no mention of the Haitian Revolution at all, three gave it less than a page, and four gave it four pages or more, which she reads as an overall increase in space since the earlier survey. Her more pointed finding concerns who writes these books. Only three had authors specialising in any aspect of Latin American history and only five had authors whose research concentrates on African history, while the largest group of contributors specialised in Asian history. She notes that many authors came from elite institutions and that several were late in their careers or had died since a first edition, and argues that early career scholars at teaching-focused institutions are largely absent.

Philip DeArmond Curtin died in 2009. Eltis and Richardson name his work as the foundation their atlas of the transatlantic slave trade rests on. Before Curtin, the scale of the traffic was handled with round figures that travelled by repetition, some running to twenty million and more, none of them tied to a document anyone could inspect. Curtin went to the shipping records and produced an estimate with its method attached, so that every scholar afterward could argue with his total by arguing with his sources. That is what made the field cumulative instead of rhetorical. The voyage database behind the atlas, with its record of individual ships, ports, owners and mortality, exists because he established that counting was possible and that a count could be corrected. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue took in hundreds of thousands of captives in its last fifty years, and the size of that traffic explains both why the colony was rich and why it went up.