Title: Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of HistoryAuthor: Karl Jacoby
First Published: November 20, 2008
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pages: 384
Genre: History, Non-Fiction
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Rating:
Synopsis:
A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history
In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O'odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest?a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.
Get the Book: AmazonReview
Shadows at Dawn recounts the tragedy of the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871. It was the old west, a period marked by years of conflict between the American settlers and the Native American populations that had steadily been pushed ever westward with the expansion of the United States.
What was noteworthy about this book was in the way that Jacoby chose to format it, dividing the book into four sections, each detailing the perspectives and events that impacted each group that was involved. Many history texts are told in a linear fashion and from one perspective only, the historian, whose biases impact the way that they engage with the facts. History is never that cut and dry, especially for those whose voices are silenced or drowned out by the dominating force.
The book sheds light on a little known event in American History and the complexity of the politics of the region, starting before the event and the aftermath. While it can be a bit repetitive and it can be difficult to match timelines, I enjoyed the way that the book was structured. This book is well documented, and although at times it can be extremely difficult to match up timelines and figuring out when events overlapped, I can’t think of a better book to give the reader a very real view of the old frontier. It is a great case study for understanding dual perspectives and the way that all of these stories come together into a shared history.
Quote
“For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Karl Jacoby
Karl Jacoby has devoted his career to understanding the ways in which the making of the United States intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies—from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico—and the ecologies upon which they rested. His scholarship is distinguished by its close attention to questions of narrative and storytelling, in-depth micro-historical approach, and border-crossing nature. Jacoby’s published work straddles multiple boundaries—not only the geographic divisions between East and West, and Mexico and the United States, but also the methodological divides between labor history and environmental history, genocide studies and Native American history, and borderlands history and African-American history.
Jacoby received his A.B. in 1987 from Brown University and his Ph.D. in American history in 1997 from Yale University. After a year as a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College, he returned to Brown as an assistant professor of history in 1999. He was promoted to an associate professor with tenure in 2003 and to full professor in 2009. In the fall of 2012, he moved to Columbia University, where he currently serves as the Allan Nevins Professor of American History and as the co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He is the author of three books, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2003), Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin Press, 2008), and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (W.W. Norton, 2016) as well as numerous essays and reviews.
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