In April 1802, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution faced a choice that would expose fundamental differences in their vision of liberty in post-emancipation society: join General Leclerc's army or continue the fight against French expeditionary forces. Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean Jacques Dessalines agreed, whilst Kongo leader Macaya and Sans-Souci refused, the latter describing his forces as “defenders of liberty.”1 Following his arrest, Louverture famously declared: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.”2 The most obvious roots of liberty were Sans-Souci's mainly African troops, known as the “Congos,” who continued the revolution using tactics honed in 1791. But when Christophe, Dessalines, and Alexandre Pétion defected from the French and joined the newly-united “indigenous army,” the conflict over who would lead the “defenders of liberty” persisted, culminating in Henri Christophe's assassination of Sans-Souci, after whom he would famously name his palace.3 Sans-Souci's death foreshadowed a broader discursive victory in post-revolution historiography, which celebrated the role of Creole and mixed-race leaders, and the political ideology of the French Revolution, to the exclusion of African people and ideas.4

David Geggus offers a detailed response to the three critiques of his “Kongomania” article by John Thornton, Christina Mobley, and James Sweet. Centered on demographic statistics and their link to cultural influence, the rebuttal examines evidentiary support for various assertions and hypotheses. The debate ranges over the use of certain ethnonyms (Creole, Congo, Mondongue); the creation of Vodou; the significance of Baudry des Lozières's Vocabulaire Congo; and the organization and aims of the 1791 uprising and the Haitian War of Independence.

Certain characters and their roles in the European conquest of America are well known: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, and a few others. Likewise, scholarly interest in the conquest has focused on the centers of great political, economic, and cultural entities such as the Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire in the Central Andes.

Thousands of soldiers swept onto the campus of the University of El Salvador with tanks and planes, ransacking buildings and arresting more than eight hundred students, professors, and staff. It was July 19, 1972, and the university had “fallen into the hands of the Communist Party of El Salvador and a minuscule group of opportunists of the most disgraceful immorality,” said the recently inaugurated president Army Colonel Arturo Armando Molina.1 Troops handcuffed the rector, Fabio Castillo, and the dean of the medical school and sent them into exile in Nicaragua.2 Early in the invasion, the troops sealed off and occupied the university's printing press, where workers produced a magazine of arts and politics called La Pájara Pinta that essayist Italo López Vallecillos and novelist Manlio Argueta had founded in 1966, and of which Argueta was still the editor.3 The campus occupation lasted two years and proved a milestone in El Salvador's long march to civil war. The closing of La Pájara Pinta that day silenced the most important forum for Salvadoran dissident writers and marked, for many of them, the end of their literary careers and the start of their lives as fugitives and, eventually, guerrillas.

It is a feature of modern nationhood that a declaration of independence is reified as a key inflection point, a specific moment in time during which a region and its people cease to be beholden to something else and begin to chart their own collective course. Independence thus represents both an end and a beginning. It is both a process and a goal. Independence is usually understood as a political act, a metaphorical coming of age, a goal achieved, and an event that brings hope. This collection of six recent books on independence in Age of Revolutions across the Atlantic world fit together to show how wartime worlds and worldviews may not fit as neatly into the textbook national story. They share an intellectual project of moving beyond the usual actors and narrative trajectories to introduce us to new perspectives on the events by looking at different regions and demographics: Austrian diplomats, British Foreign Office bureaucrats, Irish radicals, New England whalers, African traders, Chilean popular classes, Mexico City's night watchmen, and many others. These six authors tug at the standard chronology of Atlantic independence as well, pulling it back to the 1770s and extending its living impact into the 1850s. Taken together, they remind us that independence is a tricky concept, one that can look quite different depending on one's place in a broader matrix. Wars eventually end, but combative words and unreconciled worldviews collide and continue the struggle.