This week I read Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, first published with Beacon Press in 1995 and then reissued in 2015 with a new introduction by Hazel V. Carby. In this brief and beautifully written study, Trouillot explores the relative absence of the Haitian Revolution in both scholarly and popular imaginings of the history of the Americas or the history of the West, the relative (and sometimes nearly complete) silence about the Haitian Revolution in accounts of the modern world, and shows how that silence was partly a result of deliberate suppression but more Read more