UCLA historian and author Benjamin Madley won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the history category for “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873” (Yale University Press, 2016), a chilling history of the massacre of American Indians in California. The prizes were announced at an awards ceremony held Wednesday, April 21, before the start of the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Festival.
Madley has been praised as the first historian to uncover the full extent of the atrocities that decimated Caliornia's Indian population, which fell from approximately 150,000 to 30,000 during the period between 1846 to 1873. With exhaustive research, he has been able to show the involvement of the government officials and the use of taxpayer dollars to finance the killings.
"There have been books written about the systematic slaughter of California Indians, but none as gruesomely thorough as Benjamin Madley’s 'An American Genocide,'" according to Alexander Nazaryan of Newsweek.