Marlene L. Daut

Cundill Prize Finalist Marlene L. Daut Recommends Baron de Vastey, Jean Casimir, Louis Joseph Janvier and More

Marlene L. Daut

October 20, 2025

After waging a thirteen-year revolution against slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the island’s Black freedom fighters declared their independence on January 1, 1804. In the country’s first constitution, issued one year later, the newly renamed Haiti subsequently became the first nation in the modern world to permanently abolish slavery. In...

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the...

In this series commissioned by Marlene L. Daut, scholars reveal what 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

The first land to be colonized in the Americas was Haiti. Europeans first enslaved native Americans and captive Africans there, too. But the first permanent abolition of slavery also happened on Haiti, in 1804: 220 years ago this month. Such abolition only occurred in the rest...

By The Editorial Staff

What were the books of 2025 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us? For this, the 13th-annual edition of Public Picks, section editors for Global Black...

StoryGraph has posted a great non-fiction book reading challenge, which includes The First and Last King of Haiti:

Instructions from the StoryGraph website:

Read at least one book...

From their website:

The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most...

By Marlene L. Daut

I honestly love history podcasts so much, and it was therefore a true honor to talk about Napoléon Bonaparte with Dr. Claire Aubin, host of the widely acclaimed show "This Guy Sucked."

We covered life in the French Caribbean under slavery and Napoleonic rule, and then I filled in all the bits that weren’t covered in high school or their previous Napoléon episode. For example, the Haitian Revolution, the genocidal methods Napoléon's army used to try to restore slavery in...

By Marlene L. Daut

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, I have noticed a lot of misinformation going around, especially in public broadcasts and on social media. As a corrective, I thought I would post a factually correct video from the Open Education Resources Project, which details how the first permanent abolition of slavery happened in Haiti in 1804.

Importantly, this kind of immediate emancipation of enslaved people only occurred in the rest of the Atlantic...

By Marlene L. Daut

In 1948, when he was just 19-years old, the St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott wrote his first play, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. The play went on to be published in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1950, and thereafter it was played on the radio and staged in London in 1952. That performance was directed by Errol Hill, who later taught as a distinguished scholar of theatre at my current place of employment, Yale University. Hill also played Christophe's...