Silencing the Past

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution--the most successful slave revolt in history--alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. At the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, Silencing the Past is a modern classic and a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book's enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot's brilliant analysis of power and history's silences.