David Stannard

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), on the genocide of the native American population.

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, have two sons.

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), an 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 revolves around the fact that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii)^[1] were the victims of a "Euro-American genocidal war."^[2] While conceding 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] Stannard's perspective has been joined by Kirkpatrick Sale, Ben Kiernan, Lenore A. Stiffarm, Phil Lane, Jr., and Ward Churchill.^[2]

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 most of the causes of death mentioned by Stannard. For instance, military battle and unintentional deaths are excluded 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]

Personal life

Stannard is the longtime partner of Haunani-Kay Trask.^[5]

Works

Stannard's published books include:

• Death in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975),
• The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 1977),
• Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (Oxford University Press, 1980),
• Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (University of Hawaii Press, 1989),
• American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992), and
• Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawaii (Viking Press, 2005).

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."^[6]

Shrinking History, published in 1980, was chosen by Psychology Today as one of the 'best books of the year'.^[7] Similar praise has greeted the publication of most of his other writings^{[citation needed]} which 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.^[8] 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.^[9]

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."^{[citation needed]}

Awards

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

References

1. ^ INTERVIEW: David Stannard.
2. ^ ^{a b} Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?
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. ^ Nakao, Annie (May 28, 2005). "The 1932 murder that exposed the hole in Hawaii's idyllic facade". The San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/28/DDGR2CV6V41.DTL. 
6. ^ Lawrence Stone, "Death in New England," New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978.
7. ^ STANNARD, David Edward
8. ^ David Stannard (1992). American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508557-4. "During the course of four centuries - from the 1490s to the 1890s - Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas." (p.147). "[It] was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world."(Prologue)
9. ^ (See, for example, Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu, eds., The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies (University of Hawaii Press, 2007)

External links and Further Reading

• "American Studies, David Stannard". Hawaii.edu. http://www.hawaii.edu/amst/textonly/people_stannard.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-05.  Profile.
• Nakao, Annie (May 28 2005). "The 1932 murder that exposed the hole in Hawaii's idyllic facade". San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/28/DDGR2CV6V41.DTL. 

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Name	Stannard, David Edward
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Date of birth	1941
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