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The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination.

The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. "The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times," Clarkson proclaimed. In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.

This essay makes a decisive turn to the history and historiography of African American intellectual history, a field of study long relegated to the margins of the general field of US intellectual history. Its principal intention is to reflect on the origins, growth, and recent institutionalization of African American intellectual history while showing the relationship between those developments and broader trends within the US and, at times, European historical profession. This framework is meant as a corrective. African American intellectual history is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods. Yet it also demands centering within US and global intellectual history. Marginalized for too long, African American intellectual history has long proposed and advanced innovative ways of doing and conceptualizing intellectual history. I suggest that this burgeoning field has important, generalizable lessons about the practice and possibilities of intellectual history writ large.

The emergence of Black Lives Matter has introduced a language of black liberation to a new generation of students. In doing so, it has provided an opportunity for historical study. Teacher-scholars can and should take advantage of the renewed interest in systemic threats to black life in the United States when teaching about past victims of state-sanctioned violence including Celia, an enslaved teenager executed for killing her master after years of sexual abuse. In doing so, they can not only draw useful connections between the past and present but also lay the foundations for a more meaningful study of black radicalism and black resistance in the United States.

In 1915, United States marines arrived in Haiti. Their landing signaled the beginning of an occupation that would cripple Haiti long after it ended in 1934. Scholars have offered compelling insights into African American opposition to the erosion of Haitian sovereignty. But this scholarship has prioritized the activism of Black men and male-dominated institutions while deemphasizing the complex reaction of Black women to the occupation. This article highlights that overlooked reaction. It shows that some leading Black women continued to speak of the need to civilize Haiti. Others constructed organizations that emerged from imperialist discourses and sometimes relied upon imperialist structures. By demonstrating how middle-class and elite Black women navigated a transitional moment in Black intellectual history—adhering to traditional notions of racial uplift, civilization, and respectability even as they presented radical calls for Haitian liberation—my paper contributes to the literature on the US occupation of Haiti while establishing new lines of inquiry into Black political culture, women's organizing, and US imperialism.

The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is now firmly established in mainstream history. Yet Haiti's nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite independent Haiti's vital importance as the first nation to permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in the Atlantic World.
Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855–1911) is one of the foremost Haitian intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today.
Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians (1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S. imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti's domestic politics. It offers his vision of Haiti's future expressed through a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians.
Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction, annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on Haiti's nineteenth century.

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: The Contours of Black Intellectual History (Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer) -- Part I. Black Internationalism -- Introduction (Michael O. West) -- "Every Wide-Awake Negro Teacher of French Should Know": The Pedagogies of Black Internationalism in the Early Twentieth Century (Celeste Day Moore) -- Afro-Cuban Intellectuals and the New Negro Renaissance: Bernardo Ruiz Suárez's The Color Question in the Two Americas (Reena N. Goldthree) -- "To Start Something to Help These People": African American Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915- 1934 (Brandon R. Byrd) -- Part II. Religion and Spirituality -- Introduction (Judith Weisenfeld) -- Isolated Believer: Alain Locke, Baha'i Secularist (David Weinfeld) -- The New Negro Renaissance and African American Secularism (Christopher Cameron) -- "I Had a Praying Grandmother": Religion, Prophetic Witness, and Black Women's Herstories (LeRhonda S. Manigault- Bryant) -- Part III. Racial Politics and Struggles for Social Justice -- Introduction (Pero Gaglo Dagbovie) -- Historical Ventriloquy: Black Thought and Sexual Politics in the Interracial Marriage of Frederick Douglass (Guy Emerson Mount) -- Reigning Assimilationists and Defiant Black Power: The Struggle to Define and Regulate Racist Ideas (Ibram X. Kendi) -- Becoming African Women: Women's Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the US Organization and the Committee for Unified Newark (Ashley D. Farmer) -- Part IV. Black Radicalism -- Introduction (Robin D. G. Kelley) -- Runaways, Rescuers, and the Politics of Breaking the Law (Christopher Bonner) -- Conspiracies, Seditions, Rebellions: Concepts and Categories in the Study of Slave Resistance (Gregory Childs) -- African American Expats, Guyana, and the Pan- African Ideal in the 1970s (Russell Rickford) -- Contributors -- Index