A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek

By Ari Kelman

Book Overview

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation's crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars.

Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674503783
• ISBN13: 9780674503786
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Thoughtful Treatment of the Past Century and a Half at Sand Creek

This book covers the initial events of the Sand Creek Massacre as well as efforts to establish the Sand Creek Massacre Site. It’s engaging and deals with questions about who gets to tell history, effects of tourism in small towns, and the real importance of location at a historic site. The people in this book are vividly portrayed and the author navigates two hundred years of American history very clearly. It would probably be best to have a bit of knowledge about the Sand Creek Massacre before reading this book, because it is not organized chronologically. But it is an engrossing and thought-provoking book. And as for the historicity, Dr. Kelman is a history professor at UCD and the book won the Bancroft Prize for history in 2014.