Caribbean

The Caribbeana Project at the American Antiquarian Society features some of the major works about the Caribbean or published in the Caribbean that can be found in AAS's collections. These include letters, manuscripts, almanacs, laws, newspapers and bound volumes of all kinds. While not a comprehensive accounting of AAS's Caribbeana holdings, this exhibition examines and emphasizes the close relationship between early British North America or the United States and the Caribbean World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. Periodicals described the Haitian revolution with sentimental and sensationalist undertones which took new life in early U.S. fiction. In The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers, Duncan Faherty demonstrates that Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the bellwether against which the prospects for the nation’s future were imagined and interrogated.