Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, Indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book talk will present the chilling history of an American genocide.
 

Benjamin Madley is an historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he is the author or co-author of more than twenty journal articles and book chapters. He also co-edited The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 2: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern, and Imperial Worlds, 1535-1914. Yale University Press published his first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873.