Reddit mentions: The best dominican republic history books

Fantastic. I love audiobooks while running. I listened to a good part of Stephen King's 11/22/63 during an ultra last year which was great, and I've been listening to them during training runs for a few years now.

My favorites to listen to while running:
Scott Jurek's Eat and Run. It is kind of fun to listen to a runner talk about running while you are running.

AWOL on the Appalachain Trail. Really great book about a journalist's experience in thru-hiking the AT.

Robert Kurson's Pirate Hunters really surprised me. Nonfiction book about treasure/wreck diving. I was mildly interested the topic before I started listening to the book but now it is a favorite subject of mine.

The Martian. I can't say enough about the audiobook - the story is great and the audiobook makes the experience so much greater.

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler, of course. Great, atomospheric noir. One of the first audiobooks I ever purchased. Engaging and makes you forget the miles.

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".

great video, that's something I would like to try one day!
I read this book recently, called "Pirate Hunters", blew my mind. It's a real account of a duo of treasure hunter scuba divers searching for lost pirate ships, check it out:

https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunters-Treasure-Obsession-Legendary/dp/0812973690

Actually, thedeejus is accurate about the culture of the DR and the desperation to escape -- with baseball seeming like the best path out. It's well-documented in an engrossing book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris

Teško je izdvojiti ali zadnje što sam čitao je Breatheology i Pirate Hunters

This sounds a little revisionist. Classic text on the slave revolt in San Domingo (wasn't Haiti then) is here. The primary reason the country never prospered was then and remains internal strife akin to what we see following many revolutions today, an inability to develop an effective and functioning government. I'm sure embargos then would have made things much worse. Colonial nations then were incredibly threatened by the potential for slave revolts as their economies depended on slaves.

As a follow-up or, more accurately, a specifying question, I am particularly interested in his claim that "Columbus's gold exports also resulted in the paralysis of the gold economy of the Gold Coast in Africa. This led to the rise of African slaves as the dominant commodity in that region, which inadvertently makes Columbus the father of the transatlantic slave trade."


Now, I had read about all the allegations leveled against Columbus in the rest of the comic before. I am by no means an expert on that area of history, or even particularly knowledgeable in it, but Michele Wucker's Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola provides a fairly thorough rundown of Columbus' gubernatorial exploits in the first few chapters. Unfortunately I do not have access to that source material currently, so I am unable to provide any direct quotations to answer the original question here, but it would be a good source for one who wants a more academic take on the events covered in the comic.


However, I do not recall Wucker or any of the other authors I have read making the comic's claims about the causal impact Columbus' actions had on the birth of the slave trade. Looking online, I found only a few less-than-reputable looking websites that essentially repeated the same claim. Is it a stretch to make that sort of connection between Columbus and the slave trade? Did his actions really have that big of an impact on the West African gold economy?