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Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000.

Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, California Indian resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended.

His book talk will present deeply research findings.


Benjamin Madley is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles where he writes about the United States, Native America, and colonialism in world history.

His articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, European History Quarterly, The Journal of American History, Journal of Genocide Research, and other journals.

His first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, and numerous other prizes and accolades.

In 2026, the book appeared in French as Un génocide américain: L'extermination des Indiens de Californie. Madley also co-edited The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 2: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern, and Imperial Worlds, 1535-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).