The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 spotlighted the astonishing surge of academic interest in the island that has emerged over the past decade. Major conferences have been held at the College of Charleston, the John Carter Brown Library, and the University of the West Indies (Trinidad campus) to commemorate the event; these meetings showcased the high-quality research on Haitian history, literature, and travel accounts being done by David Geggus, Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus, Alyssa Sepinwall, Tim Matthewson, Mimi Sheller, Sybille Fischer, Laënnec Hurbon, and Charles Forsdick, among many, many others. In this new and valuable anthology, historian Jeremy Popkin has done a great service to the profession, and undergraduate students in particular, by compiling a collection of mostly unpublished primary sources left by eyewitnesses to the complicated events and colorful personalities that accompanied Haitian independence.In his introduction, Popkin notes that, although there is a massive amount of documentation related to the military, diplomatic, political, and ideological aspects of the revolution, there is a striking lack of knowledge about the lives and experiences of everyday people in those tumultuous times. Popkin made a valiant effort to look beyond sources that are already widely available in English and wisely has not included extracts from well-known writers such as M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marcus Rainsford, Prince Saunders, and Pamphile de Lacroix. Among his selections are Auguste Binsse, a member of the pompon rouge pro-white faction who opposed any concessions to any other racial groups in 1793; an extract from an unpublished contemporary play called “Le philanthrope révolutionnaire ou l’hécatombe à Haïti”; the observations of a French naturalist named Michel-Etienne Descourtilz; the narrative of prisoner of war and religious convert Honoré Lazarus Lecompte; the memoirs of a 12-year-old boy named Élie-Benjamin-Joseph Brun-Lavainne, who was accidentally taken to Saint-Domingue on a French ship in the opening years of the revolt; and the deposition of Marie Jeanne Jouette, who was taken prisoner by the insurgents in 1792. Although nearly all of the 19 accounts are written by white men, it is nevertheless possible to access a variety of opinions and experiences through records of their contacts and conversations with women, slaves, mulattos, free blacks, and ideological opponents. Many of the authors also left their impressions of prominent leaders such as Toussaint, Dessalines, Rochambeau, Sonthonax, Le Clerc, and Aaron Burr. The extracts reveal underlying changes in racial attitudes and indicate how pervasive the political violence was and how dramatically the military events of the Haitian revolution affected the lives of each and every resident on the island.Interestingly, Popkin derived the idea of compiling eyewitness testimonies of (genocidal) racial revolution from several disparate influences. As a writer himself, Pop-kin was affected by the magisterial re-creation of personalities and events in Madison Smartt Bell’s trilogy of novels set in the Haitian Revolution. As an engaged intellectual, he is interested in race and slavery in the Americas, and he has a sister who was involved in truth and reconciliation processes in El Salvador and Guatemala. Popkin’s own recent scholarly work has focused on the intersection between history and autobiography, which has led him to teach courses on Holocaust survivor accounts. In several of his introductory prologues, Popkin points out a striking similarity between some of the Saint-Domingue residents’ eighteenth-century accounts and the strategies, tropes, and cross-group solidarity that he sees in twentieth-century Holocaust survival literature. For example, he notes that the story of the white Janvier sisters, young girls who were rescued from dangerous mobs by black sympathizers at great personal risk and later betrayed by neighbors, bears much resemblance to the bravery and nonsectarian humanistic efforts of some Europeans to hide their Jewish neighbors from Nazi persecutors. One would not want to stretch the comparison too far, given the vastly different cultural, racial, and colonial conditions of slave-owning society, but on an individual level, the parallels are intriguing.Two editorial changes would have made the collection easier to use. First, the 19 chapters are presented in rough chronological order but are identified by inconsistent titles, and none includes names. For this reason, it is difficult to identify the person or viewpoint contained in specific chapters by consulting the table of contents. Second, although the chapters themselves have extensive endnotes that identify relevant secondary sources, the bibliography lists only the sources for the actual extracts used in the anthology and a few other selected unpublished manuscripts. One must assume that this economy of ink and paper reflects ongoing efforts by publishers to reduce costs, but it does render the citations more cumbersome to wade through for those wanting to follow up on leads or who might wish to make a general survey of current historiography of Haitian revolutionary studies. These drawbacks are vastly outweighed, however, by the careful academic research, judicious selection of hard-to-access voices, and inclusion of ten powerful illustrations. This most welcome book is sure to be consulted regularly in the classroom and in broader scholarship.