Every claim traced.
Every debate visible.
Search five centuries of Haitian history in Kreyòl, French, English, or Spanish — across 256,000+ pages of primary sources, with competing scholarly interpretations made explicit.
Five ways into the same archive.
Whether you start from a question, a person, a place, a number, or a document — every path leaves a trail of citations.
99 collections, browseable
From Linstant de Pradine's Recueil to the Affiches Américaines — colonial, Haitian, and diplomatic sources, side-by-side.
Browse archives02 · PEOPLE249 lives, traced
Curated profiles. Every claim cites the scholar making it.
Open figures03 · CONNECTIONSWhere people, places & events meet
An interactive graph over 7,200+ entities — drawn from the corpus, hand-verified.
Open graph04 · DATAQuantitative records
Indemnity payments, voyages, marronage entries. Download as CSV.
Datasets05 · SEARCHFull-text, cross-lingual, cited
Type once. Get hits in Kreyòl, French, English, and Spanish — each tagged by source perspective.
Open search- 1492Contact
Columbus's first landing on Hispaniola begins three centuries of colonial reshaping that the corpus traces through colonial chronicles, ecclesiastical records, and indigenous testimony recovered from later sources.
- 1685Code Noir
Louis XIV's edict codified the legal infrastructure of slavery in the French Caribbean — its provisions structured plantation life on Saint-Domingue for the next century.
- 1697Treaty of Ryswick
The treaty formally ceded the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France, creating Saint-Domingue as a French colony.
- 1791Bois Caïman
The Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman is widely held to have inaugurated the slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution.
- 1801Toussaint's Constitution
Toussaint Louverture's constitution declared the abolition of slavery and made him Governor for life of Saint-Domingue — the first Black-led constitutional state in the Americas.
- 1804Independence
Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence at Gonaïves on January 1, 1804, founding the first Black republic and the only state ever born of a successful slave revolt.
- 1825Indemnity
France demanded 150 million francs from Haiti in exchange for diplomatic recognition — a debt the corpus traces through ledgers, parliamentary records, and press coverage that ultimately took 122 years to repay.
- 1915U.S. Occupation
U.S. Marines invaded and began a 19-year military occupation, recorded in Senate hearings, U.S. military archives, and Haitian press.
- 1934Occupation ends
U.S. forces withdrew under President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, ending direct military occupation but not financial control.
- 1947Debt paid
Haiti's final payment on the 1825 indemnity — 122 years and several refinancings later — closed a financial chapter that had shaped its economic policy since independence.
- 2010Earthquake
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake near Port-au-Prince killed an estimated 200,000 and reshaped Haiti's archives — the corpus draws on contemporary reportage and oral testimony from this period.
How Rasin builds trust
From OCR and translation to citations and review, Rasin shows how each record becomes searchable evidence for researchers to inspect.