The Haitian Revolution


Book Description

Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.




Taking Haiti


Book Description

The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years--and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans--including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.




Bankers and Empire


Book Description

From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism—but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers’ racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks’ experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives.




The Economic History of the Caribbean Since the Napoleonic Wars


Book Description

Examines the economic history of the Caribbean, and is the first analysis to span the whole region.







How Wall Street Created a Nation


Book Description

How Wall Street Created a Nation: J.P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal narrates the dramatic and gripping account of the beginnings of the Panama Canal led by a group of Wall Street speculators with the help of Teddy Roosevelt’s government. The result of four years of research, the book offers the real story of how the United States obtained the rights to build the Canal through financial speculation, fraud, and an international conspiracy that brought down a French republic and a Colombian government, created the Republic of Panama, rocked the invincible President Roosevelt with corruption scandals, and gave birth to U.S. imperialism in Latin America.







The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934


Book Description

Review: "Detailed and useful history of US intervention in Haiti (1915-34); originally published in 1971, and re-released in 1995 at the time of the US invasion of Haiti. Contains many interesting insights"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas/







Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900-1921


Book Description

The commonly held view that the interests of American business dominated U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean during the early part of this century is challenged by Dana G. Munro, prominent scholar and former State Department official. He argues that the basic purpose of U.S. policy was to create in Latin America political and economic stability so that disorder and failure to meet foreign obligations there would not imperil the security of the United States. The U.S. government increasingly intervened in the internal affairs of the Central American and West Indian republics when it felt that their stability was threatened. This policy culminated in the military occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and varying degrees of control in other countries. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.