American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World [Paperback]

David E. Stannard (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195085574 | ISBN-13: 978-0195085570 | Publication Date: November 18, 1993 | Edition: Reprint

For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.
Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Stannard (history, Univ. of Hawaii-Manoa), whose previous works include Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory ( LJ 6/1/80) and Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (Univ. of Hawaii Pr., 1989), turns his attention to the devastating impact of the European intrusion into the New World. He argues that with more than 100 million people the Americas were not the unpopulated open spaces so often described and notes the squalor and disease that dominated Europe in contrast to the relative peace and harmony that prevailed in the New World. The arrival of the Spanish and other Europeans, he argues, brought about a demographic disaster of incredible proportions--the largest genocide in history--as a result of disease and depredation, as well as through enslavement and outright massacre. Though Stannard tends to gloss over violence and intertribal warfare in pre-Columbian America and accepts accounts of Spanish atrocities by early chroniclers as well as high population estimates for pre-Columbian America, his is a carefully researched, well-written monograph based on the latest secondary sources. A provocative account for public and academic libraries.
- Brian E. Coutts, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A splendid antidote to those many books on American Indian policy that tend to ignore the realities of the subject."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"Superb scholarship and compellingly accessible presentation."--Professor Benjamin R. Tong, Ph.D., California Institute of Integral Studies

"American Holocaust isa substantial addition to the library of injustice toward American Natives....From an ethical standpoint, works such as Stannard's are necessary to counterbalance the ethnocentricities of past historical works on Natives. From an academic standpoint, the book is an interdisciplinary monument. The author has taken an incredible amount of data and applied contemporary anthropological, demographic, and historical techniques to synthesize a comprehensive piece of scholarship. American Holocaust will provide a desireble textbook for students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Finally, scholars of Indian-white relations from various disciplines will find the book a valuable resource in terms of method and content."--Samuel R. Cook, American Indian Quarterly."

"An important work that will have [Stannard] canonized by some and pillored by others by the end of the Quincentennial Year. It is the product of massive reading in the important sources, years of pondering, and fury at what Europe hath wrought in America....His convincing claim is that what happened was the worst demographic disaster in the history of our species, that Old World diseases and Old World brutality reduced the number of Indians enormously and drove away many Native American peoples over the brink of extinction. How convincing are his evidence and reasoning? Very, I am unhappy to say....Nothing can be done to improve the past, but we can at least face it. David Stannard insists that we do."--Alfred Crosby, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Offers a much-needed counterbalance to centuries of romantic confabulation about the explorer."--The Los Angeles Times

"Honest, factual, painful, powerful, inspiring!"--Zaher Wahab, Lewis and Clark College

"Vivid and relentless, combining a formidable array of primary sources with meticulous analysis--a devastating reassessment of the Conquest as nothing less than a holy war."--Kirkus Reviews

"We need to be reminded, again and again, of what Stannard speaks of as 'the treasure of a single life.' Stannard gives us a fine review of recent literature and a rousing, effective call to define our terms,'racism,' 'genocide,' and use them to describe what happened and still happens."--Ellen Nore, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

"A fascinating book, enormously impressive in its research and engaging in its style....Puts the Columbus story in philosophical and historical perspective. Further, it makes connections with our own time which are unsettling and profoundly important."--Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

"A shattering realization is brought home: the German holocaust was not unique in history. There is a holocaust in our American past. We owe it to its victims, and to our own future, to reflect on Stannard's merciless book."--Hans Koning, author of Columbus: His Enterprise

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reprint edition (November 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195085574
• ISBN-13: 978-0195085570
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > History > Europe > Spain

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Connected Holocausts, March 21, 2004

By 

Tara Marshall "Tara" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Paperback)

My one quibble with this book is that it only chronicles destruction - it does not discuss the long and continuing resistance of Native American people and cultures. In places like Vermont, the Abenaki continue to live in the shadows of their white neighbors, learned to use guitars and fiddles so we wouldn't be arrested for drum playing, and quietly suffer through continuing discrimination (there are several stores, where I could walk in and wait as long as the store is open, and not be served). A dirty little secret of the Democratic Party, which continues to hold the governorship of Vermont, is that it runs on a platform of never recognizing the Native People of Vermont - whether or not we gain federal recognition. (For fair comparison, I should note that the Republican Party wants to remove sovereign status from all Native Nations.) This is rascism, and Vermont history is completely whitewashed. The few times the Abenaki are mentioned in Vermont history textbooks that are sanctioned for use in the schools, we are constantly labeled as murderers and thieves. Never mind, of course, that we were murdered and raped in large numbers by European settlers who were stealing our crops and land.

Besides the continuing tribal resistance, there are very important modern movements of resistance that are pan-Indian, and embrace Hispanics and sympathetic whites and others, such as the Seventh Generation Project in Minnesota, and Tonatierra in Arizona.

The worst critique most people have come up with about this book is that its count of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere is inflated. That is hardly the case. If you check the research of modern anthropologists and professors in American Indian Studies Departments, you find out that the numbers have been consistently undercounted up until the modern day, and that the "accepted figures" taught in school were based on very little evidence.

There was native-on-native violence, and I agree that this has been somewhat glossed over. However, that is almost refreshing compared to the historically inaccurate painting of native peoples as bloodthirsty barbarians found in most of the older histories. Spanish conquerers are known to have over-counted the number of humans sacrifices made by the Aztecs, while not mentioning their own human sacrifices to God in the form of the Spanish Inquistion and the many bloody Christian sectarian wars being fought in Europe at the time. I cannot imagine the victims feel any worse about being sacrificed on an altar instead of a battlefield, and both are sacrificed in great pain in the name of a God or gods.

The rest of the critiques I have seen are rascist nonsense. One particular reviewer said that it only showed the "indian side of the story". First of all, Indians are inhabitants of India, I am Native American or American Indian, at least to outsiders, just as only blacks are allowed to use the inflammatory n-word with each other in single-race company. Secondly, the vast majority of histories only tell the white side of the story, so reading the "other side" should be informative. Thirdly, sir, to be mildly insulting, you sound like a stereotypical holocaust denier in your critiques - and I do mean of both the American and the European Jewish. There are very few books that only tell Hitler's side of the story - and none of them are accepted as valid scholarship. The same should hold true in modern histories of what happened in Native America.

I make this comparison for good reason - that being that Hitler is documented as having said that he based his final solution for the Jews on the U.S. government's final solution of the "Indian problem". In the thirties, this was continuing - with the Vermont Eugenics Project and other rascist eugenics projects that specifically targeted Native Americans and African Americans to be surgically castrated. Several of my grandmother's cousins were caught and targeted in that net. It continued in the 60s, when the BIA-run hospitals were discovered to be using saline solution instead of vaccines on our infants, experimental surgery on our people, and to be basically castrating women during C-sections so they could not have any more children. And it continues today, with uncapped Uranium deposits on Navajo land out west doing irreparable genetic damage to the people, with the Superfund site that magically "ends" at the border of the Akwesasne Reservation in Upstate New York and Canada, and many others (Winona LaDuke wrote an excellent book covering this continuing devastation in detail).

I highly suggest reading Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, in addition to this book.

43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If Only It Wasn't So Black and White, November 7, 2005

By 

J Taylor (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Paperback)

American Holocaust was published in 1992 in occasion of the 500 year anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the Americas. In the midst of much celebratory scholarship praising the greatness of Euro-American history and culture, Stannard wrote a book that tells history from a very different side. It present a vivid account of the European conquest of the Americas and focuses attention on how the often celebrated conquest resulted in nothing less than a holocaust for the Indigenous peoples of the America.
The first two-thirds of the book consist in a very graphic reconstruction of HOW the colonization of the Americas took place. Stannard pulls no punches and delivers us all the horror and brutality of the European invasion in no uncertain terms. The overall effect is rather depressing, but at the same time enlightening. Reading it before a hot date, though, is not suggested since you will probably be in a bad mood for hours. The second half of the book switches gears and focuses on WHY the colonization of the Americas took place the way it did. Showing he is not afraid of controversy, in a chapter entitled "Sex, Race, and Holy War" Stannard draws a direct connection between Christianity and the genocide of Indian peoples. Stannard himself admits that this is not the only explanation for the brutality of Euro-American conquest, but he suggests religion was an important part of it, and I tend to agree with him.
Overall, the book is nothing short of amazing. Unlike most boring historical analysis, this is one that--love it or hate it--is impossible to remain indifferent to. It is very captivating and beautifully written.
The only major flaw in Stannard's work is that he tries too hard to pigeonhole all facts in a "good Indian" versus "bad European" portrait. Showing the many, many exceptions to this rule would not undermine his argument. If anything, it would help it since it is easier to be convinced by an author who is not trying at all costs to divide reality in stark black and white. Furthermore, his overall conclusions are mostly supported by the facts. Some critics focus on Stannard's exaggerated black and white portrait and use it to dismiss it his entire argument. Had Stannard been just a little more even-handed in his treatment of the subject, it would be much harder for his detractors to dismiss him out of hand. This is an extremely important counterpoint to decades of scholarship based on racism and blind nationalism.

36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Power of Knowing, November 26, 2001

By 

Melvin G. Brennan III "jihi no kokoro" (Scotland UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Hardcover)

If, like "a reader" from New York, NY, you find that this work is "utter garbage," that's fair I guess. The most powerful thing, for me, however, about this material is the response it receives from others.
The spectrum of discourse can be found here, among the reviews.
The truth is that Native Americans were here first, in large numbers, and after the Europeans arrived, their culture, way of life, and people were "reserved" on patches of the land they formerly inhabited. If someone came along and tried to do that do present-day Canada, Mexico, and the US, we would see fighting on a scale not seen sicne the Second "World War." But we justify it somehow in our minds; to me, I think that we find ways to make genocide of Native Americans "okay" so as to avoid the psychic split that must occur in a human mind that has become fully aware of the evil that was involved in establishing this land for non-Natives.

Therein lies some of the reviewer response you will find. Read the book. Then read ten others. In the end analysis, you will return to the same place I inhabit; a place of amazement at how our leaders break breath to speak at all without first falling to their knees in begging for forgiveness for the evil that has taken place.

And I'm not even Native American. Wonder what they think...

Simply amazing.