Excert: Shadows at Dawn

Reckoning with this violence involves facing some of the more difficult aspects not only of the American past but of the historical enterprise itself. Unlike almost any other object of historical study, violence simultaneously destroys and creates history. The physical annihilation of another human produces a profound absence that distorts the historical record for all time. One of the most immediate manifestations of violence is thus a terrifying silence that no testimony of the past can fathom in its entirety. As Primo Levi once commented, “The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone…no one ever returned to describe his own death.”

Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and Violence of History, Karl Jacoby, 2008, Penguin Books, pg. 3