Reviews several books on Cuban history before 1959. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898-1934, by César Ayala; Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, by Ada Ferrer; Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, by Rosalie Schwartz.;
Hall examines the wealth of materials in the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a young man with considerable experiences and full of curiosity. Thistlewood's diaries are of special interest, for he entertained representatives from both of the land of gentry and, because of the slaves and free blacks and coloureds.;
Sheridan discusses some of the common endeavours he shared with Douglas Gordon Hawkins Hall concerning the West Indian Economic and Social History. Foremost among the historians of the transition from slavery to freedom in individual West Indian colonies is Douglas Hall, whose contributions to West Indian history and culture are manifold.;
Campbell discusses the history of education in the Dominican Republic over a long period of time, from the inception of Spanish colonization in Hispaniola to the achievement of its first real independence in 1844. He seeks not to enter into postmodernist debates about the viability of the traditional historical narrative but to search for truth about what really happened through the traditional use of the sources.;
Since its publication in 1976, Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus has gone through 21 printings, while receiving widespread--though not unanimous--condemnation from the American archaeological establishment, culminating in a hostile, full-length forum in Current Anthropology. And yet, startlingly, the field of American archaeology has recently found itself in the midst of a major paradigm shift, caused by archaeological evidence that obliterates the Clovis model as a legitimate demarcation of the first presence of human settlement in the New World. Kamugisha proposes to trace the response to They Came Before Columbus, while discussing the issue of diffusionism in van Sertima's work.;
