This is Black Thunder, a Sioux man taken around 1908. Across the 18th and 19th centuries, boundaries between Black and Native worlds were not fixed but lived through enslavement, escape, intermarriage, alliance, and shared confrontation with a nation expanding over both. Yet records rarely capture that complexity. The portrait names him but does not explain. A man made visible, a history only partially told. Library of Congress. Source: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3c07322/
Additional primary documentation
Organization of American States. "Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Haiti." Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 2002.
https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/pdfs/2023/Informe_Haiti_EN.pdf
Journalistic and Contemporary Accounts
BBC News. “Profile: Jean-Bertrand Aristide.” BBC, March 2011.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-12633115
Pollen, Lydia and Weiner, Tim. "Haiti's President Forced Out; Marines Sent to Keep Order.” The New York Times, February 29, 2004.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/international/americas/haitis-president-forced-out-marines-sent-to-keep.html
11/11
Still more after that
Hallward, Peter. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso, 2010.
Fatton, Robert Jr. Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002.
Reports and Primary Documentation
United Nations Security Council. "Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti." New York: United Nations, 2004
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/519750?v=pdf
10/11
And more than that
Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Dupuy, Alex. Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.
Dupuy, Alex. The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti. Nee York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
Farmer, Paul. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994.
9/11
And more
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971.
8/11
Still more sources
Girard, Philippe R. Haiti: The Tumultuous History—From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation. New York: Palgrave St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.
Heinl, Robert Debs Jr., and Nancy Gordon Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti: State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
7/11
More Sources
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Originally published 1938.
Popkin, Jeremy D. A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012.
6/11
Intellectual Map
The Haitian Revolution
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso, 1988.
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Fick, Carolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Geggus, David Patrick. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
5/11
Before sunrise, Aristide was escorted onto a waiting plane and flown out of the country he had been elected to lead. By morning he was gone. Haiti was not an exception, but part of a recurring history in which democracy abroad has often been tolerated only when it aligned with American interests.
4/11
Image: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard B. Myers talks with Brigadier General Ronald S. Coleman after disembark from Toussaint Louverture IAirport 13 March 2004. Wikimedia Commons.
That military repeatedly shaped who could rule. In 1991, only months after Aristide’s first democratic victory, soldiers forced him from office. By 2004, armed rebels—many veterans of earlier coups and paramilitary campaigns—were again moving toward Port-au-Prince as American forces returned.
3/11
Image: Soldiers of C Company, 2nd Battalion 22nd Infantry, 10th Mountain Division securing Port-au-Prince Airport on the first day of Operation Uphold Democracy, Sept. 22 1994, Wikimedia Commons.
