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 alleged genocide of the native American population. The book popularized the term American Holocaust.

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, Timothy and Adam.

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 is of the opinion that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii) were the victims of a "Euro-American genocidal war." 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. Stannard's perspective has been joined by Kirkpatrick Sale, Ben Kiernan, Lenore A. Stiffarm, and Phil Lane, Jr., among others; the perspective has been further refined by Ward Churchill, who has said "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed."

Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been challenged because he does not cite any demographic evidence to support this number, and because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook, Latin Americanist and history professor at Florida International University, considers books such as Stannard's– a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage to America– to be an unproductive return to Black Legend-type explanations for depopulation. In response to Stannard's figure, political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead 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. "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."

Personal life

Stannard is the longtime partner of Haunani-Kay Trask.

Bibliography

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."

Shrinking History, published in 1980, was chosen by Psychology Today as one of the 'best books of the year'. Similar praise has greeted the publication of most of his other writings 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. 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, Stannard's most recent work, 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.

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."

Awards

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

External links and Further Reading

• "American Studies, David Stannard". Hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2008-05-05. Profile.
• Nakao, Annie (2005). "The 1932 murder that exposed the hole in Hawaii's idyllic facade". San Francisco Chronicle. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)