The Black Jacobins

Rare is the book of history that remains in print over eighty years later, but James's ground-breaking account of the Haitian Revolution—written in 1938, revised in 1962, and meant to inspire and celebrate the revolutions of the oppressed in both moments—has become a part of history itself. And the book itself remains a marvelously readable telling of a crucial, stunning, and still poorly understood event. James (a Marxist) often pays more attention to factions and classes than the personalities that popular historians usually build their stories around, but even he can't resist the phenomenon of Toussaint L'Ouverture, a slave until he was 45 and then, for a decade, one of the most capable and consequential people on the planet, whose tragic career shows, as James writes, that "Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make."