ENDLESS HOLOCAUSTS: MASS DEATH IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES EMPIRE - DAVID MICHAEL SMITH

As part of the “Blame America First” crowd, this book really spoke to me. It’s a sort of history book slash thesis that seeks to count up all the deaths the US has been responsible for over its history. Smith hits the big ones right off the bat, the indigenous holocaust that began before America proper and continues to this day, along with the slave trade. Both of these events are pretty hard to quantify accurately. There’s a fascinating overview of the scholarship in these two areas. Smith quotes various academics who have tried to estimate the total number of Natives in North and South America before Columbus as well as folks who have tried to not only calculate the total number of Africans enslaved and shipped out of Africa but also estimate how many must have died in during the raids and transportation to the coasts, before these people even got to the boats. Obviously, these are two numbers that are near impossible to know for sure and are both subject to future scholarship, multiple books have been written on both topics but Smith manages to give a good overview of the current thinking. He also dives into a long discussion of the various wars and military encounters and coups and genocides the US has been involved in directly or funded. This part of the book is all short little hits. A coup in Brazil here, a genocide in Indoneisa there, all of this adds up. I’m pretty interested in US history so most of this was not new to me but it was handy to have it all laid out in one spot. Each of these events deserves their own books, and these books do exist (I’ve read dozens of them) Smith is going for a bird’s-eye view so he only spends a page or so on each. The book has hundreds of pages of notes so there’s ample resources to dive into at the end. He really gets in his bag when he attempts to quantify and lay out all the deaths associated with unsafe working conditions and harmful products and labor strikes associated with America’s particular brand of capitalism. This section, which he calls the Worker’s Holocaust, is also quite thorough and interesting. Again, if you’re familiar with something like A People’s History, you probably have heard of most of this stuff but it’s pretty mind-blowing to see it all laid out so clearly and easily in one spot. It’s a depressing read overall, he puts his total number of deaths in the various American Holocausts at around 300 million people in the US’s history, but it’s pretty vital. I’d recommend it for people looking to get into American History.