David Stannard

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David Edward Stannard (born 1941) 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.

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 M.Phil. 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. The recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, American Council of Learned Societies and other research fellowships and awards, he has lectured throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia.

As 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. His published books include Death in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford University Press, 1977), Shrinking History (Oxford University Press, 1980), Before the Horror (University of Hawaii Press, 1989), American Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1992), and Honor Killing (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." <Lawrence Stone, "Death in New England," New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978.> His Shrinking History, published in 1980, was chosen by Psychology Today as one of the 'best books of the year'.^[1] 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, his most controversial major work, Stannard 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.^[2]^[3] Although praised by the likes of 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).

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 in his book Before the Horror--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. (See, for example, Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu, eds., The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies (University of Hawaii Press, 2007). 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."

Stannard is the longtime partner of Haunani-Kay Trask.^[4]

[edit] References

^ STANNARD, David Edward
^ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named DS-Review
^ 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)
^ The 1932 murder that exposed the hole in Hawaii's idyllic facade