The Haitian Revolution: A New Vision of Freedom in the Atlantic World

Duke University historian Laurent Dubois discusses slavery, culture, and ideology in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which upon the triumph of its revolution in 1804 became the nation of Haiti—the first and only nation established through a slave rebellion. He explores the widely divergent notions of freedom that developed in Haiti and the United States, and compares their deeply distinct declarations of independence—the first two such documents in world history.