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Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection BY JEREMY D. POPKIN Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. xv + 400 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-266-67583-1
As one of the signal moments in the history of the Atlantic World, the Haitian Revolution has enjoyed renewed scholarly interest as evidenced by recent works published by David Geggus, Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus, and Doris Garraway. In the past six years alone, ten major works have appeared, including primary source collections, edited volumes of original essays, and monographs. In the midst of this crowded field, Jeremy Popkin makes an important contribution with the publication of first-hand accounts of Saint-Domingue on the eve of, during, and after the only successful slave revolt in the history of the Western Hemisphere. These eyewitness narratives, written largely by slave-holding refugees who eventually escaped to mainland North America, other Western Hemisphere locales, or Europe, offer limited-though useful-insights into...