Overview

Battles and massacres are intimate affairs for combatants and others involved, their physical and emotional violence often stemming from fervor and fear. Although mass killing characterizes both battles and massacres, the two are profoundly different. Battles take place between armed forces; massacres are one-sided events in which the dead are mostly innocent victims. Yet the fog of war shrouds both massacres and battles in a functional amnesia. Participants remember what exactly happened during such a violent encounter only imperfectly, and later clarity cannot always rectify accounts thus rendered. Even naming the events as battles or massacres already imposes an interpretive framework upon them. This unique study centers on four critical engagements between Anglo-Americans and American Indians on the southwestern frontier: the Battle of Cieneguilla (1854), the Battle of Adobe Walls (1864), the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), and the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857). Editors Ronald K. Wetherington and Frances Levine juxtapose historical and archaeological perspectives on each event to untangle the ambiguity and controversy that surround both historical and more contemporary accounts of each of these violent outbreaks. Both disciplines, the contributors make clear, yield surprisingly similar narratives and interpretive agreement; and the lessons learned from these nineteenth-century killing fields about wartime reporting and command failures remain relevant today. Contributions by T. Lindsay Baker, J. Brett Cruse, Will Gorenfeld, Shannon A. Novak, Lars Rodseth, Douglas D. Scott, and Joe Watkins.

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9780806144405

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Reviews

Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890

Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890

Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890

Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier offers essential essays from a consortium of first-rank scholars, all with compelling insights into some of the most controversial encounters in the history of the West. An enlightening contribution, indeed. Jerome A. Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890

Author Information

Ronald K. Wetherington is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Among his numerous articles and books in both physical anthropology and archaeology are Readings in the History of Evolutionary Theory and Ceran St. Vrain: American Frontier Entrepreneur. Frances Levine, President of the Missouri Historical Society and Museum in St. Louis, is author of Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries and coeditor of Telling New Mexico: A New History and Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives.

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