On October 11, 2016, Dr. Benjamin Madley presented a lecture detailing just some of his exhaustive research on the systematic extermination of California’s indigenous population from the first wave of gold rush settlers to the beginning of California’s third decade as an American state. The result of that research is his book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873.

Benjamin Madley is Assistant Professor of History at UCLA, where he specializes in Native America, the United States, and genocide in world history. He received his Ph.D. at Yale and was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth.