A Misplaced Massacre

Ari Kelman

Published by Harvard University Press 2012

A Misplaced Massacre

Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

Ari Kelman

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067172

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars.

Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.

Author information

Ari Kelman is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Maps and Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
1 A Perfect Mob Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Looters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
3 The Smoking Gun Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
4 Accurate but Not Precise Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
5 Indelible Infamy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
6 You Can’t Carve Things in Stone Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Epilogue: When Is Enough Enough? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Academics, Students, Libraries, Institutes
Pages
- Main content: 352
Illustrations
- Other: 12 halftones, 7 maps

eBook

Published: February 11, 2013
ISBN: 9780674067172