The Project
Cornerstone laid in 1791, the year the Revolution began, at Habitation LaSaline—pc: Curci
Update: Mapping the Haitian Revolution was recently reviewed and featured in archipelagos. The review is here, and we are so grateful to the editors and reviewer who gave us such valuable feedback. Many of the suggested changes are already seen in this new version of the website.
Stephanie Curci and Chris Jones are instructors in English and History, respectively, at Phillips Academy Andover, where they also teach an interdisciplinary course entitled The History and Literature of the Haitian Revolution. Additionally, Stephanie Curci created and maintains Mapping Haitian History, an online visual records site for Haitian historical and cultural sites.
We designed this site with a few different audiences in mind. Primarily, its purpose is to help our students understand the complicated narrative of the Haitian Revolution across time and space. These students include high school seniors as well as tenth-grade students, who study a shorter unit on the Haitian Revolution. We also wanted to provide a resource for other teachers at the high-school level who might be looking for a collection of English-language materials to help create or buttress an existing unit on the Haitian Revolution.
Our students are multilingual and multinational, but we are an English-language, American school. This project started as an English-language site and in creating this site, we read widely but ultimately tied each map point to an English-language source so that teachers could find resources in that language. We acknowledge the problems of power in such an approach. The project is now available in other languages—French, Kreyol, and Spanish—thanks to the team at CreoleTrans.
This project was developed by Stephanie Curci and Chris Jones with support from the Tang Institute and was built with Axis Maps. We used maps from both the John Carter Brown Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. We are deeply grateful to both of these libraries as well as the Tang Institute and Axis Maps for their support of this digital project.