The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

A political, military, and institutional history of the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, tracing how the intervention emerged from wider U.S. Caribbean expansion, how it legalized itself through treaty manipulation and a rewritten constitution, and how marines built a centralized state while claiming to deliver democratic uplift. Schmidt's core argument is that the occupation's material record — roads, sanitation, administrative centralization — cannot be separated from military coercion, corvée forced labor, and the bitter anti-American insurgency that those conditions produced.