Michel-Rolph Trouillot begins his brilliant analysis of the silences embedded in history in general and the particular erasure of the Haitian Revolution from Western historiography with a tale about how a political act of memory rewrote history. When on March 6, 1836, the Mexican forces led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna broke through the mission turned fort nicknamed “the Alamo,” he appeared victorious. But Trouillot argues, when Santa Anna fell prisoner to Sam Houston a week later at San Jacinto, he was doubly defeated. “He lost the battle of the day; but he also lost the battle he had won at the Alamo.” When Houston's men punctuated their attacks with shouts of “Remember the Alamo,” explains Trouillot, “they doubly made history. As actors, they defeated Santa Anna and neutralized his forces. As narrators, they gave the Alamo story a new meaning.” For Trouillot, the inherent ambiguity in the word history entails a slippage between actors and narrators and between agents, actors, and subjects.

Trouillot's account of the Alamo illuminates an insight at the heart of memory studies: history is never unmediated; it is produced. Shifts in meaning-making and perceptions in the present can turn the past as on a pivot, with the ground giving way in what historians call the unstable past, or the unpredictability of the past. The memory of the Alamo, transmuted into an icon for the Republic of Texas, was absorbed into the national identity of the United States. By annexing Texas and going to war with Mexico, the United States forever altered relations with its southern neighbor. And as Trouillot's analysis demonstrates, the inability of Westerners to imagine even the possibility of Africans acting politically distorts Western perceptions of the Haitian Revolution, resulting in similarly momentous foreign policy consequences for the United States and the world.

Among scholars of US foreign relations, Emily Rosenberg has made important interventions in the debates ensuing from the proliferation of memory studies and the often-politicized entanglements in culture wars.