Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

Now that so many grand projects of the past are up for reappraisal, Michel-Rolph Trouillot interrogates history, to ask how histories are in fact produced. . . . A beautifully written book, exciting in its challenges. --Eric R. Wolf

""An accessible book filled with wisdom and humanity."" --Bernard Mergen, American Studies International

""Aphoristic and witty, [Silencing the Past] shows that the two senses in which history is made, by doers and by tellers, meet in moments of evidentiary silence. [A] hard-nosed look at the soft edges of public discourse about the past."" --Arjun Appadurai

""Trouillot is a first-rate scholar with provocative ideas. . . . His work [is] a feast for the mind."" --Jay Freeman, Booklist

""Trouillot makes the postmodernist debate come alive."" --Choice

""A sparkling interrogation of the past. . . . A beautifully written, superior book."" --Foreign Affairs

""Elegantly written and richly allusive. . . Silencing the Past is an important contribution to the anthropology of history. Its most lasting impression is made perhaps by Trouillot's own voice--endlessly agile, sometimes cuttingly funny, but always evocative in a direct and powerful, almost poetic way."" --Donald L. Donham, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

""Written with clarity, wit, and style throughout, this book is for everyone interested in historical culture.""--Civilization