David Stannard - Works

Works

Stannard's published books include:

• Death in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975),
• The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 1977),
• Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (Oxford University Press, 1980),
• Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaii on the Eve of Western Contact (University of Hawaii Press, 1989),
• American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992), and
• Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawaii (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."

Shrinking History, published in 1980, was chosen by Psychology Today as one of the 'best books of the year'. His other writings have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

In American Holocaust, he 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. Although praised by 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).

Before the Horror 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—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.

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."