American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
Stannard (history, Univ. of Hawaii-Manoa), whose previous works include Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory ( LJ 6/1/80) and Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (Univ. of Hawaii Pr., 1989), turns his attention to the devastating impact of the European intrusion into the New World. He argues that with more than 100 million people the Americas were not the unpopulated open spaces so often described and notes the squalor and disease that dominated Europe in contrast to the relative peace and harmony that prevailed in the New World. The arrival of the Spanish and other Europeans, he argues, brought about a demographic disaster of incredible proportions--the largest genocide in history--as a result of disease and depredation, as well as through enslavement and outright massacre. Though Stannard tends to gloss over violence and intertribal warfare in pre-Columbian America and accepts accounts of Spanish atrocities by early chroniclers as well as high population estimates for pre-Columbian America, his is a carefully researched, well-written monograph based on the latest secondary sources. A provocative account for public and academic libraries.- Brian E. Coutts, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling GreenCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.