Mapping Haiti: Archives and Histories of Cap-Haïtien

Cap-Haïtien, Haiti is a significant yet understudied locale in Haitian and global  history. Over the course of its history, this port town has had many different landscapes.  Framed by the Atlantic Ocean and the Massif du Nord mountain range, the port city in the northern coast of Haiti  has been built, brought to ruins, and  rebuilt  by natural and man-made disasters and innovations.  Prior to the 16th century, its known history encompassed indigenous peoples and landscapes whose erosion followed the December 1492 landing by Christopher Columbus.  The 17th century through the present day ushered its transformation into a French colonial site, center of plantation capitalism, enslaved African labor,  major Atlantic port, a religious center of African beliefs reimagined in New World contexts, a revolutionary birthplace/battleground of the Haitian Revolution and northern campaigns, a diplomatic hub, a migration magnet, locus of education, intellectual thought, and artistic production, tourism and heritage center,  and contemporary Caribbean city connected to rural environs.  Yet, centuries  of uncertainty in Haitian history have made it so that primary sources to investigate and narrate a biography of the city and its inhabitants have been lost and/or dispersed to varied institutions and in private ownership across the world.  This project endeavors to unearth Haiti’s rich history through facilitating research on Cap-Haïtien based on questions of urbanism, cartography, architecture, mobility, landscape, built environment, and historical GIS. 

This project addresses a contributing factor to the lack of research, the perception that there are no source materials to investigate and understand how Capois (those who live in the town) and those who have sojourned through the region have experienced and shaped urban life.  Through building a digital repository of dispersed sources and the creation of new spatial narratives, this project invites students, scholars, and the greater public to investigate and understand Cap-Haïtien not as an isolated site of exceptional events, but as a dynamic city whose people, landscapes, and built environments have been active participants in global history.  This portal aggregates digital finding aids and digital sources from the 19th century through ca. 2010  -in English, French, Haitian krèyol, and other languages -  that are housed in numerous archives, libraries and institutions around the world.  In tracking down, sorting, and making visible  primary and secondary sources, this project produces a resource - a repository of scholarship, writing, maps, visual, audio,  and video representations  – which makes knowledge and the creation of knowledge about the city accessible to the global public. 

Rather than recovering a “lost” history, Mapping Haiti: Archives and Histories of Cap-Haïtien seeks to excavate a history that has long existed but remains fragmented across institutions, languages, and national boundaries. This  project also explores questions about  methods and ethics in modern digital humanities (analog and computational) research and historical storytelling.  Utilize your investigative skills to exploit the dataset. Users can locate the materials, critically analyze, and interpret them to narrate the history of Cap-Haïtien. The repository includes sources on social, political, geopolitical, economic, and cultural themes, as well as changes in geography and architecture.  Develop your critical thinking  and storytelling skills through analyzing the evidence in these sources to draft narratives that tell the complex history of this port city and its human and physical geography. We hope this platform will allow users to excavate nuanced, accurate, and multifaceted narratives that capture the dynamism of this city and those who lived there. The repository is not exhaustive, and the project aims to improve, expand, and refine the data as users engage with the research process.