Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s-the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. For four hundred years-from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S.