In his path-breaking two-volume study, The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959-64) Robert R. Palmer famously devoted barely a page to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Today the Haitian Revolution is regarded as one of the most important events in the so-called Age of Atlantic Revolution, with a profound impact on slave-holding societies throughout the Americas and on conceptions of race and citizenship throughout the Atlantic World. In the decades since Palmer wrote, an ever-growing circle of scholars has transformed our understanding of the uprising of people enslaved in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and of the events that led to the founding of an independent Haitian state in 1804.

Historians of many different regions and eras teach about the Haitian Revolution and study its impact. The panel will attract historians who teach and research the African Diaspora, the French Revolution, United States history in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, decolonization, and slave resistance generally.

In this panel, three authors describe how their new books frame the Haitian Revolution and challenge existing interpretations. In her 2021 book Crystal Eddins analyzes thousands of cases of marronnage (slave escapes) in French colonial Haiti, from the 1760s to the 1790s. Portraying this flood of self-liberation in all its variety, she argues that marronnage constituted a fundamental underpinning for the great slave uprising of August 1791. In her presentation, Eddins discusses how Black Studies scholars have contributed to the study of the Haitian Revolution. Tessie Liu approaches the Black revolution from a different perspective in her 2022 monograph about the different civil rights accorded to free-born and formerly-enslaved revolutionaries by French Revolutionary elites. Liu argues that French abolitionists forged a revolutionary notion of color-blind equality while accepting or even defending severe restrictions on the rights of people freed from slavery in 1794. Like Eddins, John Garrigus presents a new view of the forces underlining the August 1791 slave uprising. He emphasizes how enslaved people responded to a hither-to-unknown combination of environmental and political dangers. He identifies the coffee and sugar plantations where the revolt first broke out and shows that people enslaved on those operations faced the same double dangers. To set these new perspectives into context, Marlene Daut, the leading literary historian of the Haitian Revolution, will provide commentary on the three papers.