University of Pennsylvania Press
The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti
While much attention has been given to African Americans’ twentieth-century engagement with Africa, East Asia, and the Communist International, Brandon R. Byrd places Haiti firmly at the center of Black political thought as it developed after the United States’ Civil War. He offers a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ ideas about Haiti, not just the Haitian Revolution, and shows how their fluid thinking about Haiti shaped broader developments in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Black political thought.
Overview
While much attention has been given to African Americans’ twentieth-century engagement with Africa, East Asia, and the Communist International, Brandon R. Byrd places Haiti firmly at the center of Black political thought as it developed after the United States’ Civil War. He offers a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ ideas about Haiti, not just the Haitian Revolution, and shows how their fluid thinking about Haiti shaped broader developments in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Black political thought.
Brandon R. Byrd is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on Black internationalism. He earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently teaches history at Vanderbilt University. His favorite books include Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and Edwidge Danticat, Brother I’m Dying (2007).
The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. This session is co-sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and co-chaired by Karin Wulf (College of William and Mary), the director of the Omohundro Institute. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.
Wilson Center
Moderators
Christian F. Ostermann
Woodrow Wilson Center
Eric Arnesen
Professor of History, The George Washington University. Director, National History Center of the American Historical Association.
Karin Wulf
Hosted By
History and Public Policy Program
The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Read more
Latin America Program
The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action. Read more
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