La Gazette Royale

The La Gazette Royale digital archive was recently given Honorable Mention for the 2019 Garfinkel Prize in the Digital Humanities awarded by the American Studies Association (ASA). The site, which was launched in April 2017, is designed to gather together and in one place for the first time all of the known issues of the two newspapers published during Henry Christophe’s rule of northern Haiti, as well as the six different versions of the Almanach Royal d’Hayti issued by the royal press. The most comprehensive collection of La Gazette Officielle de l’état d’Hayti and La Gazette Royale d’Hayti to appear in a single repository, there are 95 separate issues gathered on this website. They have been collected from archives located around the Atlantic world, including France, Haiti, England, Ireland, Denmark, and more than a half dozen U.S. states. This project is not solely designed to be an archive of these materials, however. It also proposes to take visitors on a digital journal through Haiti’s early print culture by providing brief descriptions and commentaries to accompany each publication. Some of these entries may provide summaries of specific articles featured in that week’s newspaper; others, call our attention to important concurrent historical circumstances; and still others point out significant individuals, laws, literary elements, or changes of print format that might help guide readers in their own exploration of these remarkable documents.