David Stannard

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David Edward Stannard (born 1941) is an American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. He is particularly known for his book American Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1992), in which he argues that European colonization of the Americas after the arrival of Christopher Columbus resulted in some of the largest series of genocides in history.

Contents

Early life

He was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard, a businessman. He served in the armed forces and worked in the publishing industry between 1959 and 1968. In 1966, he married Valerie M. Nice. The couple, subsequently divorced, had two sons, one of whom died in 2015.

Career

After returning to college in 1968, Stannard graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State University in 1971. He then went to Yale and obtained an M.A. degree in history (1972), a Master of Philosophy in American Studies (1973), and a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1975. He has taught at Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Colorado, and the University of Hawaii. He has lectured throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia.

He is currently a writer and professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, where he was awarded the Regents' Medal for Excellence in teaching. He has contributed dozens of articles to scholarly journals in a variety of fields.

American Holocaust

Stannard's research on the indigenous peoples of North and South America (including Hawaii) [1] has produced the conclusion that Native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people." [2] While acknowledging that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust. [3] In response to Stannard's figures, political scientist Rudolph Rummel has estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide, which excludes military battles and unintentional deaths in Rummel's definition. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history." [4] According to Guenter Lewy, Stannard's perspective has been joined by noted scholars and activists including Kirkpatrick Sale, Ben Kiernan, Lenore A. Stiffarm, Phil Lane Jr., and Ward Churchill. [2]

Samuel R. Cook of The American Indian Quarterly [5] wrote:

American Holocaust is a 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 desirable 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." [6]

Alfred Crosby of The Boston Sunday Globe wrote:

An important work that will have [Stannard] canonized by some and pilloried 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." [6]

Francis Jennings of Early American Literature [7] wrote in his review of the book:

I must note how powerfully this book's prose carries a reader forward. Although Stannard disclaims intent for propaganda, he achieves it massively. He writes up a storm. In my desire to stress what is praiseworthy, I have used up my assigned space, but I must at least mention Stannard's silly season efforts to blame Europeans' sadism on the sexual repression of Christianity...

Personal life

Stannard was the longtime partner of Hawaiian nationalist, University of Hawaii professor emerita, and author Haunani-Kay Trask. [8]

Works

Stannard's published books include:

The Puritan Way of Death was referred to in The New York Review of Books as one of the handful of books—and the only one by an American—that together constituted "the most original and important historical advance of the 1970s." [9]

Shrinking History, published in 1980, was chosen by Psychology Today as one of the 'best books of the year'. [10] His other writings have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

In American Holocaust , he argues that the destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, in a "string of genocide campaigns" by Europeans and their descendants, was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. [11] Although praised by Howard Zinn, Vine Deloria, Dee Brown and others, Stannard's argument generated a great deal of critical commentary. He responded to much of it in a lengthy essay entitled "Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship", published in Is the Holocaust Unique? , edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum (Westview Press, 1996).

Before the Horror has focused on Hawaii and the Pacific. Having dramatically and upwardly revised the estimated population of Hawaii at the time of Western contact from about 200,000 to between 800,000 and 1,000,000—a change that forced major rethinking about the entirety of Hawaii's history—that work is now being used as the foundation for re-examinations of indigenous population histories throughout the Pacific. [12]

In 2005 Stannard's book Honor Killing used an infamous rape and murder case of the 1930s—one that involved Clarence Darrow arguing his final spectacular defense—to open up a detailed social and political examination of the Hawaiian Islands under US colonial rule. In its review The New York Review of Books described Honor Killing as "finely written and meticulously researched... a biopsy of the racist and imperial arrogance that are an integral, though seldom acknowledged, motif of the history of America." [13]

Awards

Stannard was the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, American Council of Learned Societies and other research fellowships and awards.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Democide</span> Government-sanctioned killing

Democide refers to "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command." The term was first coined by Holocaust historian and statistics expert, R.J. Rummel in his book Death by Government, but has also been described as a better term than genocide to refer to certain types of mass killings, by renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. According to Rummel, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims, extrajudicial summary killings, and mass deaths due to governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines like the Holodomor, as well as killings by de facto governments, for example, killings during a civil war. This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genocide</span> Intentional destruction of a people

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

Mass killing is a concept which has been proposed by genocide scholars who wish to define incidents of non-combat killing which are perpetrated by a government or a state. A mass killing is commonly defined as the killing of group members without the intention to eliminate the whole group, or otherwise the killing of large numbers of people without a clear group membership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolph Rummel</span> American political scientist (1932–2014)

Rudolph Joseph Rummel was an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes result in the least democides.

<i>Encomienda</i> Spanish labour system in its colonies

The encomienda was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. The labourers, in theory, were provided with benefits by the conquerors for whom they laboured, including military protection and education. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian reconquest of Moorish territories, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered to be a monopoly on the labour of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Population history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guenter Lewy</span> American historian

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">First wave of European colonization</span> Aspect of history

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The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colonialism and genocide</span> Relationship between colonialism and genocide

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<i>American Holocaust</i> (book) Book article

American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World is a multidisciplinary book about the indigenous peoples of the Americas and colonial history written by American scholar and historian David Stannard.

This is a select annotated bibliography of scholarly English language books and journal articles about the subject of genocide studies; for bibliographies of genocidal acts or events, please see the See also section for individual articles. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included for items related to the development of genocide studies. Book entries may have references to journal articles and reviews as annotations. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter-length bibliographies. The External links section contains entries for publicly available materials on the development of genocide studies.

Below is an outline of articles on the academic field of genocide studies and subjects closely and directly related to the field of genocide studies; this is not an outline of acts or events related to genocide or topics loosely or sometimes related to the field of genocide studies. The Event outlines section contains links to outlines of acts of genocide.

References

  1. ↑ "INTERVIEW: David Stannard". www2.hawaii.edu.
  2. 1 2 "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? | History News Network". hnn.us.
  3. ↑ Stannard, p. x (quotation), p. 151 (death toll estimate).
  4. ↑ Cook on Stannard, p. 12; Rummel's quote and estimate from his website, about midway down the page, after footnote 82. Rummel's estimate is presumably not a single democide, but is a total of multiple democides, since there were many different governments involved.
  5. ↑ Cook, Samuel R. (22 March 1995). "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World". The American Indian Quarterly . University of Nebraska Press. 19 (2): 240–242. doi:10.2307/1185171. JSTOR   1185171 . Retrieved 10 January 2022– via Gale.
  6. 1 2 "American Holocaust | David E. Stannard | 9780195085570 | Oxford University Press Canada". www.oupcanada.com.
  7. ↑ Jennings, Francis (1994). "Reviews -- American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard". Early American Literature . Chapel Hill Press. 29 (3): 305–307. ProQuest   215383939 . Retrieved June 11, 2022.
  8. ↑ Nakao, Annie (May 28, 2005). "The 1932 murder that exposed the hole in Hawaii's idyllic facade". The San Francisco Chronicle .
  9. ↑ Stone, Lawrence (October 26, 1978). "Death in New England". The New York Review of Books .
  10. ↑ "STANNARD, David Edward". michaelroth.tripod.com.
  11. ↑ Stannard, David (1992). American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-508557-4. far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.
  12. ↑ (See, for example, Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu, eds)., The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies (University of Hawaii Press, 2007)
  13. ↑ Merwin, W. S. (2006-03-23). "Dishonor in Hawaii". The New York Review of Books . ISSN   0028-7504 . Retrieved 2018-04-24.
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