Title: | American holocaust: Columbus and the conquest o f the New World |
Author: | David Edward Stannard |
Translator: | |
Editor: | |
Language: | English |
Series: | |
Place: | New York |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Year: | 1993 |
Pages: | XVI, 358 |
ISBN: | 9780195085570 |
File: | PDF, 6.2 MB |
Download: | Click here |
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.