![]() | |
Author | Benjamin Madley |
---|---|
Subject | California Genocide |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Publication date | 27 June 2017 |
ISBN | 9780300230697 |
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 is a 2017 non-fiction book about the California genocide by history professor Benjamin Madley.
An American Genocide was the first book to fully document the U.S. government-sanctioned California Genocide.[1] The book was published by Yale University Press[2] and is used by Yale University.[1]
The 692 page book[2] was published on 27 June 2017.[1] It was written by Benjamin Madley, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.[2]
The chronologically arranged[3] book documents the United States-government's role in the 19th-century California genocide. The book details killing of Native Americans by the Americans who violently colonised California. It gives the pre-1846 history in which Spanish colonisers used Native Americans as a source of low-cost labour, and how Native Americans suffered from both disease and land theft. When the Americans arrived, they started a program of genocidal extermination, killing 80% of the Native American population, who lacked access to firearms.[2] The book reports on the slavery that Americans subjected Native American women and the abuse of children:
“[Some] white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. . . . Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid.”[2]
The book's author names the actions as genocidal[4][2] and devotes 200 pages of the book[2] to documenting almost every killing that took place during the time period that the book covers.[5]
The book won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 2016 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.[1]
In 2018, Pacific Historical Review described the book as "monumental."[5] The Journal of the Early Republic described it as "impressive" and praised the author for the quality of his research.[3]