American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

by David E. Stannard

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195075811
• ISBN13: 9780195075816
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

If Only It Wasn't So Black and White

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.

Connected Holocausts

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 v

America's Best Kept Secret

This book is among the most absorbing, compelling, riveting, and painful, as well as emotionally distressing accounts of the invasion of the so-called ?New World? I have ever read. The contents have been painstakingly and remarkably well researched and while both graphic and explicit in recording the sheer, wanton torture and undiluted butchery meted out to Native American Indian People, on a scale that is difficult to comprehend, feel this content is entirely justified. This account rapidly dispenses with centuries of liberal romanticism, fallacy, myth and propaganda, regarding the invasion of the Americas by Europeans. Why Columbus continues to be feted as some kind of ?hero? beggars belief when, for the sheer scale of atrocities inflicted upon the Native populace, throughout the American Continent he should, in actual fact, be reviled and despised just as much as Adolf Hitler for the ?ultimate solution? against the Jews. Not only did Native People have to contend with overwhelming, mind-numbing atrocities but also the influx of European diseases to which they had no immunity and which decimated their numbers still further. The portrait of unadulterated death, disease, misery and apocalyptic devastation endured by American Indian Nations is inordinately difficult to imagine and can fully understand their motivations for consciously choosing not to conceive children, to spare them the horrors into which they would, undoubtedly, have been born.The greater amount I read, the more abhorred I became by the Christian roots of genocidal racism and extent to which Christian religious fervour and those in its, alleged, ?service? contributed, on a large-scale, to the overall intentional brutalities, slaughter and deliberate, wilful annihilation of Native People.What I feel is significant about this book is that it brings the situation up to date and addresses the issue of vehement Anti-Indian attitudes prevalent throughout America, today and this was more than amply illustrated when reading ??.throughout Central and South America Indian men and women and children have been murdered by agents of the government that controls them, simply because they were Indians; native girls and boys have been sold on open slave markets; whole families have died in forced labor, while others have starved to death in concentration camps. More will be enslaved and more will die in the same brutal ways that their ancestors did, tomorrow, and every day for the foreseeable future. The killers, meanwhile, will continue to receive aid and comfort and support from the United States government, the same government that oversees and encourages the ongoing dissolution of Native American families within its own political purview ? itself a violation of the U.N. Genocide Convention ? through its wilful refusal to deal adequately with life-destroying poverty, ill health, malnutrition, inadequate housing, and despair that is imposed upon most American Indian Nations who survive

SGL from Florida

To anyone who challenges the veracity of David Stannard's historical facts and accounts on the Spaniards pitiless cruelty toward the American Indians should also read DOGS OF THE CONQUEST by Author: JOHN GRIER VARNER. Regretfully the hardcover is out of print but can be checked out at your local library. Hopefully the publisher will reprint it in a paperback mode. It relates to Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards who brought to the new world a very large breed of mastiff dogs specifically trained to hunt, tear up, kill and feed from the Indians flesh ... men, women or children. For the Spaniards it was a simple (bloody) sport to entertain themselves, because they regarded the natives as sub-humans or animals. Where the Spaniards left off in their goal to exterminate the Indians, the Bristish and the American Colonists and forefathers took over as related in the "TRAIL OF TEARS" by Author: GLORIA JAHODA and in "BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE" by Author: DEE BROWN. I highly recommend American Holocust by David Stannard. It should be a required reading for all high school students. It's about time the truth be finally told about the quasi total extermination of a noble race.