Michael Deibert - With the Pen in One Hand and the Sword in the Other
Saturday, Dec 12, 2026 4:00 PM
Location:
A Cappella Books
208 Haralson Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
A sweeping history of Haiti’s first century that examines its complex internal political dynamics and its tangled relations with the United States.
A Cappella Books welcomes author Michael Deibert for an in-store talk and signing in honor of his new book, “With the Pen in One Hand and the Sword in the Other: Haiti and the United States in the Nineteenth Century.”
This event is free and open to the public; copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the Book
Michael Deibert’s “With the Pen in One Hand and the Sword in the Other” is a sweeping history of Haiti’s first century, examining its complex internal political dynamics, the vital role the nation played in liberation movements throughout the Americas, and its tangled relations with the United States. Weaving the diverse stories of the region into a vibrant tapestry of shared struggle under the shadow of both colonial European powers and an ever-more-assertive United States, Deibert uses decades of experience in the region to bring such historical figures as Frederick Douglass, Simón Bolívar, Anténor Firmin, and Ramón Emeterio Betances to life in new and vivid ways. In doing so, he also examines the shared histories of Haiti and the United States, the hemisphere’s two oldest independent republics, and the values each espoused and claimed to live by, sometimes coalescing and sometimes clashing. A must-read for anyone interested in Latin American and Caribbean history as well as the history of the antebellum and postbellum United States,
“With the Pen in One Hand and the Sword in the Other” restores Haiti to its rightful place as a nation at the forefront of the struggle for human freedom during the era and presents, in dramatic and compelling form, the glories and costs that came from being at the forefront of that battle.
About the Author
Michael Deibert first visited Haiti in 1997 and has been working as a journalist, author, and analyst there for three decades. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Foreign Policy, Le Monde diplomatique, and Folha de São Paulo, among other media, and he has been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Al Jazeera, Channel 4, France 24, and National Public Radio as well as in the pages of The New York Times, The Economist, El País, Der Spiegel, and other publications. He received a fellowship from the International Peace Research Association and was selected as a finalist for the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, in recognition of his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
