Unsung History6 Jan 2025

Henry Christophe: The King of Haiti

Henry Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution, was, from 1811 to his death in 1820, King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, the first, last, and only King that Haiti ever had. This week we look at Christophe’s meteoric rise from being born enslaved on an island hundreds of miles from Haiti to fighting in the American Revolution to serving as a general in the Haitian Revolution to being king of all he surveyed, until it all came crashing down around him. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University and author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Maestro Walter's Brass Band, Final March - JEZI OU KONNEN,” by Félix Blume, from Death in Haiti; the audio is available under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0. The episode image is a portrait of Henry Christophe from 1816 by Richard Evans; the painting is in the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

“The Haitian Revolution Timeline,” by Kona Shen at Brown University, 2022.
“The United States and the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804,” Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute, United States Department of State.
“How Toussaint L’ouverture Rose from Slavery to Lead the Haitian Revolution,” by Kedon Willis, History.com, Originally posted August 30, 2021, and updated, August 18, 2023.
“Inside the Kingdom of Haiti, ‘the Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere,’” by Marlene Daut, The Conversation, Originally published January 23, 2019, and update November 16, 2022.
“Rare document sheds light on historical black queen,” The University of Central Lancashire, September 26, 2019.
“Atlantic freedoms: Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution,” by Laurent Dubois, AEON, November 7, 2016.
“The Play That Electrified Harlem,” by Wendy Smith, Library of Congress.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(230)

Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago's Nineteenth Ward

In the fall of 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side, full of good intentions to help the poor people of the neighborhood. They were a force for good, p...

10 Aug 46min

Buddy Bradley

Buddy Bradley, born in the Jim Crow South in 1905, made his way to Harlem at age 16 where he learned to tap dance and became a chorus boy. He was sought out on Broadway as both teacher and choreograph...

27 Jul 50min

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

During World War II, afraid that major league baseball would need to pause while men were overseas fighting, Philip K. Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, spearheaded a new profe...

13 Jul 54min

The Declaration of Independence

The Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but it took weeks for the news to spread throughout the ...

29 Jun 48min

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building loom large in the American imagination, symbolizing the conflicting ideas of liberty and empire; their meanings and characters have shifted over tim...

15 Jun 38min

An American History of Purses

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of wo...

1 Jun 40min

The Lady Bird Special

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special, a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed...

18 Mai 41min

Policing Slavery & Black Rebellion in the American South

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white e...

4 Mai 50min