Natalie Zacek is senior lector and subject leader in American Studies at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on the history of the English and French Caribbean, and is currently at work on a study of horse-racing and regional elite formation in the nineteenth-century United States.

Haiti’s “horrid civil war”: The 1791 Haitian Revolution and its Legacy in America

Following the success of the American colonies in gaining their independence from Britain, an endeavour in which he had played no small part, Thomas Jefferson hoped that people of other nations would follow his countrymen down the road to political revolution. But the black republic of Haiti and its citizens became a national nightmare at this foundational moment of American history, and in many ways have retained that identity for over two hundred years. Continue reading