(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best caribbean history books

I've read some Edwige Danticut, pretty amazing Haitian author. Fiction, though, so I don't know if that's what you're looking for. Krik? Krak! was particularly good.

Also, this looks pretty good in terms of non-fiction.

There are lots of great books about Port Royal in its heyday. The first ones I'd recommend are The Sack of Panama by Peter Earle and Empire of Blue Water by Stephen Talty which both give really solid broad introductions to the politics and environment of the Caribbean and Port Royal's relationship with buccaneers during its heyday in the 1660s until 1671 when England started to crack down on them.

If you want more specialized reading exclusively on Port Royal then I'd recommend Pirate Port: The story of the sunken city of Port Royal by Robert F. Marx for some light reading, and if you want a really excessively meticulous study of everything you ever wanted to know about Port Royal from written records and archaeological findings with lots of maps and reconstructions included then read Port Royal Jamaica by Michael Pawson and David Buisseret.

Lastly, a great primary source on Port Royal in its heyday is the contemporary book The Buccaneers of America which was published by Alexandre Exquemelin in 1678. Exquemelin himself was an actual former French/Dutch buccaneer and the book contains many of his first-person recollections, such as this describing the activities of buccaneers in Port Royal in the 1660s which has clearly influenced some modern pirate tropes:

> Captain Rock sailed for Jamaica with his prize, and lorded it there with his mates until all was gone. For that is the way with these buccaneers -- whenever they have got hold of something, they don't keep it for long. They are busy dicing, whoring and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. Some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day -- and next day not have a shirt to their back. I have seen a man in Jamaica give 500 pieces of eight to a whore, just to see her naked. Yes, and many other impieties.

> My own master used to buy a butt of wine and set in the middle of the street with the barrel-head knocked in, and stand barring the way. Every passer-by had to drink with him, or he'd have shot them dead with a gun he kept handy. Once he bought a cask of butter and threw the stuff at everyone who came by, bedaubing their clothes or their head, wherever he best could reach.

> The buccaneers are generous to their comrades: if a man has nothing, the others will come to his help. The tavern-keepers let them have a good deal of credit, but in Jamaica one ought not to put much trust in these people, for often they will sell you for debt, a thing I have seen happen many a time. Even the man I have just been speaking about, the one who gave the whore so much money to see her naked, and at that time had a good 3,000 pieces of eight -- three months later he was sold for his debts, by a man in whose house he had spent most of his money.

It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! This month's winner is Jessica Perrigan! The selection of books we have available this month are:

• Amanda Claridge and Claire Holleran's A Companion to the City of Rome, featuring a chapter from an upcoming AMA guest (Mar. 9), Matthew Nicholls.
  
  
• Jeremy C. Young's The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940. See his AskHistorians AMA.
  
  
• Lars Schoultz's That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, recommended by our guest, /u/thucydideswasawesome.
  
  
• E. Michael Whittington's The Sport of Life and Death: The Mesoamerican Ballgame, my recommendation
  
  Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

Haitian Vodou ("voodoo" is the term used primarily to distinguish Louisiana voodoo, which is different) did originate in west Africa (the primary source of slaves for the Atlantic slave trade). Vodou is conceptualized as a syncretic mix of traditional African religious practices mixed with distinctly New World elements.

Vodou is descended from several different west African religious traditions. A French man named Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery traced the origin of Vodou to Dahomey (roughly modern Benin) and Kingdom of Arada Arada. Vodou has its origins among the Fon people (Dahomey people) in Benin, Nigeria, and Togo. These areas are thought to be ancestral to modern day vodou.

However, modern day Vodou as its practiced in Haiti and elsewhere in the African diaspora, is quite distinct from African traditional religions. It is certainly has African roots, but it has also been profoundly influenced by Catholicism and the experiences of slaves.

Sources:

• Murrell 2010 is a good review of several Afro-Atlantic religions, including vodou
  
• Tann 2012
  
• Also, if you are interested in the topic, I can't recommend Mama Lola enough. It's an easy read about vodou practitioners in New York.

This book is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Haiti-Aftershocks-History-Laurent-Dubois/dp/0805093354

Also, books on colonization in general would also be helpful to understand typical post-colonial issues. Albert Memmi's "The Colonizer and the Colonized" is excellent for this. Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" is another canonical text for post-colonial stuff.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

I know this does not exactly address OP's requests but Trouillot's book uses the Haitian Revolution to discuss the creation of historical narrative. It is an excellent work to discuss theory and how events are interpreted and used for a purpose. I highly recommend it.

>20 page paper

>(This Tuesday)

Uh. You seem to be in one dilly of a pickle. I'll skip chastising you, since I'm sure the guilt you feel is punishment enough. Anyway. Glancing through what I have on hand (related to colonialism, anyway), you could try burning through something like this or this. Both are very short, but full of names and dates, stuff to get you started at the very least. I'd be surprised if your campus library didn't have them. They've got some saucy bits about religion in there, as well.

Google scholar can also be useful in a pinch. Perhaps you could try searching through that with relevant search terms, if not your own college's online databases. Clear your schedule for the weekend, get cracking.

>So, I wanted to know, hopefully from someone from Cuba or someone that has spent a lot of time there, is Castro and Cuba something to look up in the fight for Socialism?

I don't recall anyone identifying themselves as Cuban on this sub-reddit before. You could possibly put in a request on I Am A... for a Cuban's view on Castro, but if anything you would probably just get a bourgeois Miami exile.

The best source I have come across for the topic I think you are presenting here is this book. It has its own flaws, but it does a good job of looking at "both sides" if that is what you are looking for.

HOLY SHIT FINALLY!!

My History Prof— Dr. Ronald Johnson wrote this book: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance —Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 He was by far my favorite, most down to fucking Earth, awesome professor. First class I made an A in. He was a diplomat to Luxembourg appointed by Obama, he was an analyst for the CIA, he's one genuinely incredible man.

This book hits a LOT of Toussaint Louverture. It is an incredible read and very short.

Disclaimer: Yes I took his course, he was the only Prof I'd go to see speak in the business school or any other because he's a fascinating and insightful man.

If you're at all interested in this period of history, I recommend reading this book!

Amazon Link since I broke it somehow

Also shout-out to Texas State's History Dept being the tits.

> The Last Days of St Pierre, The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives, by Ernest Zebrowski Jr, 2002.

Awesome! Thanks so much. Was easy to find on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-St-Pierre-Volcanic/dp/0813530415

I'll check it out, thanks again!

To everyone who is interested in this period of history, I'd like to point you in the direction of the book The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory by Sheldon M. Stern. It's a pretty short book, and it discusses the massive inaccuracies and fabrications in RFK's memoir Thirteen Days, as well as the film adaptation and thus general public memory.

The long and short of it is that RFK and most of the members of the ExComm crafted a completely revisionist history of the events of that transpired in order to make themselves look good. While Thirteen Days paints RFK as a dovish advocate of diplomacy, in reality he was one of the most hawkish, pro-military intervention members of the committee. If it hadn't been for JFK's resolute stance against escalation, the world might well have descended into an open nuclear conflict. And despite the fact that JFK's ExComm recordings have been declassified for a few decades now, the fabricated narrative has remained pervasive.

The author was the first historian to be granted access to the tapes, and is the former head historian of the Kennedy Presidential Library, so he knows what he's talking about.

I'm Dominican and having been educated over there (in both public and private schools) I remember from history class that the teaching was that Haiti invaded the country, when what really happened was as the article above described.

Now, where may see this as conspiracy or remnants of Trujillo antihaitianismo campaigns I blame ignorance and a deficient education system (i.e. [math teachers in the D.R. only understand 42 percent of the material the are teaching] (http://www.dw.de/dominican-republic-revamps-failing-education-system/a-17625149)); for decades the whole system was underfunded and routinely even the small amount allocated for education was transferred for other projects when it wasn't outright stolen.

In fact, a common lie that is repeated often (even by some that think themselves intellectuals) is that the Haitian constitution says that the whole island belongs to them; this is based on the fact that when Haiti was born as a republic in 1804 the whole island indeed was a French colony [as a result of the Peace of Basil treaty between France and Spain] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_Republic#Spanish_and_French_rule).

So when the first Haitian constitution was drafted in 1805 the boundaries of Haiti were in fact the whole island, but not anymore. But in the Dominican Republic if you care about history and want to know what really happened, just go to the nearest library and read a history book.

Frank Moya Pons is a Dominican historian and author of [The Dominican Republic: A National History] (http://www.amazon.com/Dominican-Republic-National-History/dp/1558765190/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416203616&sr=1-1&keywords=frank+moya+pons) and you can find the information posted in the article above, plus the fact that when Juan Pierre Boyer arrived with his army at Santo Domingo, he was given the keys to the city by José Nuñez de Caceres (the last Spanish governor and creator of the short lived "Haiti Español" republic) and a mass was held in Boyer's honor as "president of the republic".

I'm a historian of Latin America, so I really only know about the US-Latin American cases or the US/Canadian/European - Caribbean cases. Peter Kornbluh has published a lot of declassified US primary source documents that relate to US interventionism abroad.

The Pinochet File, about Chile
Bay of Pigs Declassified, about Cuba

A really good secondary source is Greg Grandin's book Empire's Workshop.

A great secondary source on this sort of stuff occurring during the 1970s in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, is The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Meticulously researched (the book is over 1000 pages, the footnotes are endless). McCoy is a pretty tremendous historian, out of U of Wisconsin. His area of expertise is Southeast Asia, not the US, and like me, he stumbled into a much darker story than he ever expected to find.

I recently started playing Blood & Plunder, and when I play a historical game, I like to research the period. So I've been reading a lot about the Golden Age of Piracy, and this post is very timely to me.

http://www.firelockgames.com/

I've found author Benerson Little to be a great resource, especially this one: https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-Piracy-Behind-Pirate-ebook/dp/B01HDVCJZW/

Tariq Ali speaks very positively about this group, he focuses on the subject in his book Pirates of the Caribbean, he sees alliances like these as a powerful unifying force against the Imperialist influence of the US.

Also see his discussion of the book here:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/195292-1

Do you think calling me names is adding to the point you are trying to make, or detracting from it? Also, someone else made the claim that 100s of millions were killed by communism (though they weren't wrong). You're replying to the wrong person. I'm getting the impression you are very young, and - once again - that you have not been to or even talked to people from Cuba. I'm not trying to have an Internet slap fight with you, but you should really look into Cuban society and history. If you don't have the opportunity to actually go there or talk to Cubans, I recommend Cuba Beyond the Beach. It's written by a Canadian professor who lived many years there. It is not political, but will give you insight into what life is like there. You might curb claims like "Cuba has one of the best societies on the planet."

To say "economic success is only a measure of happiness under capitalism" is something that only someone who has lived a life of wealth and luxury will ever say. I say this as someone who lived under a communist regime, and has seen awful people both there and here. You could not be more wrong - the most materialistic people are often the poorest, or those who were the poorest, because they know the value of what they don't have. But I don't want to be antagonistic toward you - I'm just trying to point out why I think you're wrong, not that I think you're a bad person or a stupid one or anything of the sort. I hope you look into these things with a sober eye, and are not just swayed by an ideology you think is correct. Ideologies are never correct, though in a sense they are never wholly incorrect, either. It's okay to be wrong about something, it's okay to admit there's more nuance to the world than "good guys" and "bad guys", it's okay to learn. Cheers.

Sounds like you read this book:

https://www.amazon.ca/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0676975356

Its an excellent read if you like history.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

On a flight to Japan years ago, I witnessed a man who had brought nothing more than this to entertain him. For 14 hours.

https://www.amazon.ca/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0676975356/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1540167131&sr=8-2&keywords=salt+book

I understand they are preparing a new edition as we speak to include recent events.