A database of runaway notices passes fifteen thousand entries

The website Marronnage in Saint-Domingue transcribes advertisements for enslaved people who had run, together with the lists jails kept of those recaptured. Every document appears twice, as a photograph of the original page and as a searchable transcription. By 2020 the project had taken in material from newspapers in Guadeloupe, Guyane, Jamaica, Louisiana, Lower Canada and South Carolina, and was renaming itself Marronnage in the Atlantic World. Those additions carried the advertisements to 15,638 and the jail lists to 6,846. The figure the site gives for people identified, 22,638, cannot be right. An advertisement usually named one person and occasionally a few, while a jail list was generally longer and sometimes very much longer, so the count of individuals recorded has to be considerably higher. Jail lists appear to be peculiar to the French colonies, which is why historians have rarely been able to compare who escaped with who was caught. Saint-Domingue still supplies most of the material.

Jovenel Moise spent the evening of 6 July 2021 at his house in Pelerin 5 above Port-au-Prince, watching a Copa America semifinal with his wife and two of their children. He had barely left the residence for a week and was frightened for his life. He came off the telephone at about one in the morning. Shooting started nearby half an hour later. At 1:34 he called an officer of his security detail asking for backup, then the chief of police, then the commander of the presidential guard. At 1:46 he telephoned a friend and shouted that he needed help. Outside were at least twenty-one former Colombian soldiers, a justice ministry official dismissed days before, three Haitian police officers and two Haitian Americans, one of them a former informant for the American drug agency. They passed the checkpoints by announcing a DEA operation over a loudspeaker in English and Creole. Officers reached the house at about 2:20 and found the president dead, shot twelve times.

A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.