Our guest is Ari Kelman, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Davis. Prof. Kelman discusses his interesting new book, "A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek," which was published earlier this year by Harvard University Press. As we read of this volume at the Harvard U. Press website: "In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. [This book] examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site." And further, as Mick Gidley has noted in London's Times Literary Supplement: "[This] is an important book, and its most brilliant chapter, which follows the order of events at the opening ceremonies, in April 2007, of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, shows that positions taken by the various speakers on that day still echoed the differing views expressed a hundred years earlier.... Kelman provides a nuanced and virtually complete account of each of the chronological phases and of the eddying currents of opinion in the movement towards the opening of the Historic Site.... The book functions as an instructive lesson in public history, and Kelman shows how the massacre positively intersects with its legacy."
"Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek"
