Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres, by Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence

Merciless killing in the nineteenth-century American West, as this unusal book shows, was not as simple as depicted in dime novels and movie Westerns. The scholars interviewed here, experts on violence in the West, embrace a wide range of approaches and perspectives and challenge both traditional views of western expansion and politically correct ideologies. The Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of the Washita, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre are iconic events that have been repeatedly described and analyzed, but the interviews included in this volume offer new points of view and the readers will gain new information and many fresh insights