Between 1791 and 1804, men and women of African descent transformed the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent nation of Haïti, striking the most devastating blow against racial slavery and European colonialism the world had yet seen. This lecture explores the contested visions of race, independence, and democracy spawned by the Haitian Revolution.
Christopher Hodson is an associate professor in the Department of History at BYU. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and, with Brett Rushforth, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His current work focuses on eyewitness accounts of the Haitian Revolution.
Part of our fall 2024 lecture series, "Legacies of Colonialism."