In their December 2020 issue,
archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital practice recently featured the fascinating Mapping the Haitian Revolution project, by Stephanie Curci and Christopher Jones (both from Phillips Academy Andover).
How many of us, as university professors, have found ourselves teaching college students in the fields of, for example, Africana studies, American studies, Latin American studies, and history, among others, whose knowledge of Haiti’s revolution is strikingly limited if not entirely nonexistent? How many of us have had to teach into the void of disinformation that has long excluded Haiti from the so-called Age of Revolutions? The extent to which Haiti’s struggle for independence has been effectively silenced from US-American “common knowledge” is remarkable. Moreover, it is a failing we can attribute at least in part to the omission of Haiti from secondary education curricula across the country. The Mapping the Haitian Revolution aims to push back against that particular lacuna by providing to high school educators a rich and dynamic online pedagogical resource, featuring compellingly presented historical information as well as sample syllabi and bibliographical resources.