Harvard University Press Blog

A Bancroft Prize for A Misplaced Massacre

Our congratulations to Ari Kelman on his 2014 Bancroft Prize for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. A beautifully told story of the long, contentious effort to understand and commemorate one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history, A Misplaced Massacre follows Dan Rodgers’s Age of Fracture and Jeff Bolster’s The Mortal Sea as the third consecutive Bancroft Prize for HUP. The passage below, excerpted from Kelman’s Preface, traces his attempt to understand the complicated question of how a public remembers.

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I first became aware of Sand Creek more than two decades ago, while reading a letter written by an enlistee in the Iron Brigade, the unit that suffered the highest rate of casualties in the Union Army. At the time, I was looking through sources for my undergraduate thesis in one of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s reading rooms, and I hoped that the tattered pages spread out before me would reveal what had motivated volunteer troops to fight with such ferocious courage during the Civil War. I never adequately answered that question, but I still remember details of the document: written in a shaky hand, the words filled with remorse that caught me off guard, the paper cracked and yellowed with age. Looking back, the note must have been composed sometime in 1865 as its author, a farm boy from Indiana, bemoaned an event that had taken place the previous year, a slaughter he labeled “Chivington’s massacre.” The passage caught my attention because the soldier seemed to think that an explosion of violence on the borderlands, a faraway “massacre,” somehow diminished the integrity of his own service. More than a little confused, and with no Internet search engines at my disposal—truly, those were benighted times—I approached one of my mentors and asked for help. Who was Chivington? What was this mysterious episode? I found out that Sand Creek was actually part of the Indian Wars and not related to the Civil War at all. Alas, another wasted day in the archives—or so I recall thinking.

Fifteen years later, having read more about Sand Creek while in graduate school, I moved to Colorado, where I taught history and discovered that the massacre can be hard to escape. Thoroughfares that crisscross urban areas along the Front Range, a chapel on the campus of the university where I worked, a lonely town in the middle of the state’s Eastern Plains, a snow-capped mountain looming over the city of Denver—all these and more bear the names of Sand Creek’s sponsors and perpetrators. It seemed that by the end of the twentieth century, though most Coloradans no longer celebrated the massacre, they were still haunted by that chapter of their history. After learning that the National Park Service, partnered with descendants of Sand Creek’s victims and survivors, hoped to commemorate the violence, I began following that project closely. I attended public hearings, met with the principals in the memorialization process, and decided to write a book about how various groups of people have recalled the massacre very differently—from its aftermath in late 1864 through the opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in 2007. I learned that the massacre has always been hotly contested, a vivid example of the truism that collective remembrance both shapes and is bound by contemporary politics. [A Misplaced Massacre is] the result of my efforts: a study of the collision of history and memory, of past and present, at Sand Creek.

Second Chances at First Impressions

Along with all of our new books, each season we release paperback editions of dozens of titles that were first published in cloth a year or two earlier. When a paperback comes out it can be a nice reminder of a favorite work from seasons past, but it can also be an occasion to take a new look at a book that may have escaped notice the first time through. For the books themselves it can be a second chance at a first impression. With that in mind, we’ve collected here the first crop of Fall paperbacks, and excerpted the first few sentences of each. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you’d missed.

Ian Almond, Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

This book is a somewhat primitive book. It has a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy–often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians. The book does not really do much more than this. It is not some vast overview of Muslim-Christian relations since 1100, nor an in-depth analysis of inter-cultural exchange between Islam and Christianity. It does not offer profound gems of philosophical insight into how human beings can learn to love one another, nor moving moments of idealism concerning the common humanity which can overcome all political/social/religious divisions, etc., etc. The book’s very modest aim, on the contrary, is to show how Muslims do not belong to an ‘other’ civilisation, but rather to the essence of a ‘Europe’ we are quickly in the process of forgetting.

Bernard Bailyn, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Historical accounts of events and developments that took place in the Atlantic world began to appear almost as soon as contacts were established between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. But Atlantic history itself—that is, the evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—was first seen as a distinct and cohesive subject of historical inquiry in the years immediately after World War II.

Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

One evening a few years ago, a volunteer for a well-known environmental organization rang my doorbell to solicit a contribution. I declined, saying that I disagreed with the organization’s positions on various issues. The volunteer demanded to know which ones.

Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome

The year was 1468. On Fat Tuesday, the last and most extravagant night of carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat attentively watching the races from his throne high above the boisterous crowd, when suddenly a scuffle broke out. The papal guards had stopped someone who was loudly insisting on speaking with the pope urgently about a matter of life and death. The man, his beard and dark eyes barely discernible under his hood, was dressed like a philosopher. Seeing that he had captured the pope’s attention, the “philosopher” broke free of the guards and intoned: “Holy Father! You are in great danger!” The pope sat up, leaned forward, and beckoned the stranger to approach and explain. What he heard made him tremble and turn pale.

Chrystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. Felton was born in 1835 to a prosperous slaveholding family in De Kalb, Georgia. Wells, the daughter of slaves, was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence—Wells advocated on black women’s behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women—brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women’s safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lynching crusade, it was Felton’s notorious plea to “lynch a thousand a week” that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women’s rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South.

The Jamestown Project reviewed in the Boston Globe

Don't miss Michael Kenney's Boston Globe review of The Jamestown Project, Karen Kupperman's new book that chronicles "the creation story from hell."

Jamestown--not a picnic

A new AP article looks back at "the creation story from hell," which is how Karen Ordahl Kupperman describes the Jamestown settlement in her new book The Jamestown Project, out now:

Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman in a new book on the settlement, The Jamestown Project. Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation--including a man dining on his pregnant wife--are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.

"It's pulp non-fiction compared to the family-friendly tale of pious Pilgrims dining with gentle Indians," author Tony Horwitz writes in reviewing a raft of new Jamestown books for The Washington Post.

The Post review can be found here; click here to read an excerpt from The Jamestown Project.

Reclaiming Jamestown

From Publishers Weekly's review of Karen Ordahl Kupperman's forthcoming The Jamestown Project:

The Jamestown story needs retelling, says NYU historian Kupperman (Providence Island) not just because 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of its settlement. It also needs retelling because Americans tend to locate our origins in Plymouth and distance ourselves from Jamestown, which we associate with "greedy, grasping colonists" backed by "arrogant" English patrons. The first decade of Jamestown's history was messy, admits Kupperman, but through that mess, settlers figured out how to make colonization work.
...
Kupperman, marrying vivid narration with trenchant analysis, has done the history of Jamestown, and of early America, a great service.

The Jamestown Project is scheduled for publication in March 2007. Check out the officlal 400th Anniversary website for more on the history of the first permanent English settlement in American.

Jonathan Lear has got an original essay up on Powells.com

Not too many authors get asked to do this, but Jonathan Lear, author of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, has written an original essay for the Powells.com site. It's called "Philosophy and Bear Mace"--go read it and find out why.

Radical Hope is a book about how we would (should) act if our civilization were to suddenly collapse. Couldn't happen, you say? Well, the historical record begs to differ. Lear has chosen as his template a civilization that did collapse, and right here on our very soil--the Crow Nation, a Native American tribe traditionally based in Montana. He's found a hero in Plenty Coups, the last Crow chief, whose words, first heard by Lear at a lecture twenty years ago, have resonated in the philosopher's mind ever since:

After the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and we could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.

It is this "nothing happened" from which Lear's inquiry takes off. Where, exactly, do we go from "nothing?" In an age of facile comfort, it's easy to forget that people have faced this question before and will face it again. Radical Hope is an unconventional reflection on a sobering topic, and it will deserve every last bit of attention it gets.

||| Read an excerpt from Radical Hope.

Olmecs smarter than we thought

Archaeology buffs take note--the Boston Globe is reporting that scientists have discovered a slab of rock that indicates the existence of a writing culture in the Americas long before the Mayans, Aztecs, or Incas ever graced the terrain.

The Olmecs were a pre-Columbian people living in what is now southern Mexico from about 1200 BC to 400 BC. Until now, their main claim to fame has been their propensity to create gigantic stone heads like the one at left, which they kindly left around for modern archaeologists to discover some 3,000 years later.

But it appears we may have underestimated the Olmecs. During the late 1990s, locals discovered the Cascajal block, a 25-pound slab of serpentine rock that contains 62 carved symbols depicting things like maize, fish, animal skins, and so forth. Not only that, but the symbols appear to be arranged in groups, which would suggest that they're not just pictures--they're writing! Scientists have just finished dating the rock, and it appears to be from around 900 BC. Their colleagues seem to be slowly but surely becoming convinced of the stone's authenticity:

Because the stone was not found by archaeologists, the team took care to ensure it was not a fake. Geologists found weathering inside the inscriptions, showing them to be ancient, not new carvings on an old stone, according to the Science paper.

Grove said that when he first saw an image of the symbols, he suspected the stone was a fake. The text runs horizontally, instead of in the vertical rows used in later Mesoamerican writing, such as Mayan. But after seeing the weathering evidence presented in the report, Grove said that he was ready to concede the writing was authentic, but that he still found it "puzzling."

The writing system seems not to have survived the Olmecs, since as Grove points out, later Mesoamerican systems ran vertically rather than horizontally. But it does seem like it's time we gave the Olmecs their due.

Why do we at HUP care about all this? Well, we've just started distributing the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection's publication series, and one of their specialties is pre-Columbian studies. What's more, the one book we did with them in 2004 happens to be a catalog of art created by...the Olmecs! It's called Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks, and that giant head you see above is from the book's cover. If you want to know more about the Olmecs in general, consult The Olmec and their Neighbors (Olmec culture coincided with the Mayans, their neighbors to the east, for a few hundred years), also published by Dumbarton Oaks and distributed by Harvard University Press.

This day in history--Titu Cusi and the murder of Atahulapa

Well, yesterday in history, actually, but why ruin a good post title with little details like that?

On August 29, 1533, according to the New York Times, "the last Incan king, Atahualpa, was murdered on orders from Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro." Pizarro's 1532 arrival in Nueva Castilla, or Peru, marked the beginning of the end for the Incan kingdom. Here's an account of the "Dialogue of Cajamarca" (a "dialogue" in only the loosest sense of the term) between Pizarro and Atahulapa ("Ataw Wallpa" in this text) taken from the introduction to Titu Cusi: A 16th Century Account of the Conquest, published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and distributed by Harvard University Press:

Inqa Ataw Wallpa was returning to Cuzco, after having quelled rebellions in the northern Tawantinsuyu and celebrated his victory over Waskar in Quito, and had stopped in Cajamarca to heal a battle wound when he learned of the Spanish presence on the northern Peruvian coast. The conquistadors, led by Pizarro and Almagro, had already ravaged villages. The encounter between Ataw Wallpa, Francisco Pizarro, Fray Vincente de Valverde and their indigenous interpreter in Cajamarca, on November 16, 1532, is also known as the "Dialogue of Cajamarca" and has become symbolic of the conquest and the traumatic clash between cultures. More than thirty thousand unarmed men, women and children had congregated in the main square of Cajamarca to see the new Inqa and his entourage receive little over a hundred sixty conquistadors who had prepared an ambush. There are conflicting accounts of the meeting between the conquistadors and the Inqa, but the recurring theme is the "sacrilege" committed by Ataw Wallpa when he was presented with the Bible as a source of divine authority that he was forced to accept, along with the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V as his overlord. When Ataw Wallpa threw the Bible to the ground, the conquistadors opened fire and the Inqa was taken prisoner. This "dialogue" and subsequent massacre has become symbolic for the entire conquest of Peru.

Titu Cusi is an extraordinary book in that it's a first-person account of the conquest published only forty years after it occurred, making it one of the most important primary sources we have for this extraordinarily consequential series of events. Packed with dramatic tension, the book in some sense reads more like a stage play than a standard historical narrative--here we have the actual words spoken by the actual participants in the action. It's amazing that something so old can be so riveting, but Titu Cusi has got it all--murder, tragedy, intrigue--and best of all, it all really happened.

How the Indians Lost Their Land

On this day in 1626 Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from a Native American tribe known as the Canarsee. According to legend, all it cost him was $24--quite a deal by modern standards.

This agreement was only the beginning--by the time the twentieth century rolled around, nearly all the land in what is now the United States had been transferred from Indian to non-Indian hands. One school of thought has it that the transfer was accomplished through a series of transactions between consenting parties; another contends that the land was seized by force. What‚s the answer?

Well, both. According to Stuart Banner, author of How the Indians Lost Their Land, neither the "consent" narrative nor its "coercion" counterpart is sufficient to describe the actual processes by which Native Americans ceded their territory. Rather, the shift in ownership was accomplished in large part through a complex series of legal machinations on the part of settlers, predicated on conflicting understandings of just what „ownership‰ meant. In short:

every land transfer of any form included elements of law and elements of power. No non-Indian acquiring Indian land thought himself unconstrained by Anglo-American law. Whites always acquired Indian land within a legal framework of their own construction. Law was always present, but so was power. The more powerful whites became relative to Indians, the more they were able to mold the legal system to produce outcomes in their favor˜more sales, of larger tracts, at lower prices than would have existed had power relationships been more equal.

How the Indians Lost Their Land does justice to the complexity of this tragic story. It does not let whites off the hook; rather, it sets the record straight on just how the colossal transfer of land was accomplished. Banner puts it this way:

In the end, the story of the colonization of the United States is still a story of power, but it was a more subtle and complex kind of power than we conventionally recognize. It was the power to establish the legal institutions and the rules by which land transactions would be enforced. The threat of physical force would always be present, but most of the time it could be kept out of view because it was not needed. Anglo-Americans could sincerely believe, for most of American history, that they were not conquerors, because they believed they were buying land from the Indians in the same way they bought land from each other. What kind of conqueror takes such care to draft contracts to keep up the appearance that no conquest is taking place? A conqueror that genuinely does not think of itself as one.

||| Read an excerpt from How the Indians Lost Their Land