Jean-Jacques Dessalines

On American history and the history of the word “America.”

In the early 19th century, US elites demonized the self-liberated slaves of the Haitian Revolution as dangerous practitioners of barbaric rituals.

The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the island nation.

What 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare?

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.

How dogs permeated slave societies and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion and social domination.

For a long time, European historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.