
Shadows at Dawn
A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $16.10
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Malcolm Hillgartner
-
By:
-
Karl Jacoby
About this listen
A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history.
In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O'odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep.
In the past century, the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants' own accounts, prizewinning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest - a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.
©2019 Karl Jacoby (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Thinking About History
- By: Sarah Maza
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza's Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.
-
-
Well structured
- By Deeni A Alqadasi on 10-05-24
By: Sarah Maza
-
The Inconvenient Indian
- A Curious Account of Native People in North America
- By: Thomas King
- Narrated by: Lorne Cardinal
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history - in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America. Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other.
-
-
I Thought I'd Enjoy This More
- By Kristy Grainger on 08-11-18
By: Thomas King
-
Holding Our World Together
- Ojibwe Women and the Survival of the Community
- By: Brenda J. Child, Colin Calloway
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this fascinating work, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Red Lake Ojibwe Nation member Brenda J. Child spotlights the remarkable women of the Ojibwe Nation. A stunning look at a seldom explored subject in history, Holding Our World Together shows how American Indian women have profoundly influenced Native American life - from the days of the European fur trade to the present - in activism, community, and beyond.
-
-
Great book! Great narrator!
- By Briana Matrious on 10-03-18
By: Brenda J. Child, and others
-
The Poisoned City
- Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy
- By: Anna Clark
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Anna Clark's full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail - and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.
-
-
Very Informative
- By Adrianna Kurkowski on 08-06-18
By: Anna Clark
-
The Great War and Modern Memory
- By: Paul Fussell
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.
-
-
Audio not great for first time reader.
- By Amazon Customer on 01-10-19
By: Paul Fussell
-
The Harvest Gypsies
- On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 1 hr and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath.
-
-
Eye Opening
- By John Richburg on 06-05-21
By: John Steinbeck
-
Thinking About History
- By: Sarah Maza
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza's Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.
-
-
Well structured
- By Deeni A Alqadasi on 10-05-24
By: Sarah Maza
-
The Inconvenient Indian
- A Curious Account of Native People in North America
- By: Thomas King
- Narrated by: Lorne Cardinal
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history - in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America. Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other.
-
-
I Thought I'd Enjoy This More
- By Kristy Grainger on 08-11-18
By: Thomas King
-
Holding Our World Together
- Ojibwe Women and the Survival of the Community
- By: Brenda J. Child, Colin Calloway
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this fascinating work, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Red Lake Ojibwe Nation member Brenda J. Child spotlights the remarkable women of the Ojibwe Nation. A stunning look at a seldom explored subject in history, Holding Our World Together shows how American Indian women have profoundly influenced Native American life - from the days of the European fur trade to the present - in activism, community, and beyond.
-
-
Great book! Great narrator!
- By Briana Matrious on 10-03-18
By: Brenda J. Child, and others
-
The Poisoned City
- Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy
- By: Anna Clark
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Anna Clark's full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail - and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.
-
-
Very Informative
- By Adrianna Kurkowski on 08-06-18
By: Anna Clark
-
The Great War and Modern Memory
- By: Paul Fussell
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.
-
-
Audio not great for first time reader.
- By Amazon Customer on 01-10-19
By: Paul Fussell
-
The Harvest Gypsies
- On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 1 hr and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath.
-
-
Eye Opening
- By John Richburg on 06-05-21
By: John Steinbeck
-
Signature Wounds
- The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis
- By: David Kieran
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that "many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injury", which doctors were calling the "signature wound" of the Iraq War. Alarming stories of veterans taking their own lives raised a host of vital questions: For instance, why hadn't the military been better prepared to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)?
-
-
a very thorough overview of policy
- By Sue on 11-30-22
By: David Kieran
-
The Chinese Must Go
- Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America
- By: Beth Lew-Williams
- Narrated by: Jennifer Aquino
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Must Go shows how American immigration policies incited this violence, and how this gave rise to the concept of the "alien" in America. Our story begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. By tracing the idea of the alien back to this violent era, Lew-Williams offers a new origin story of today's racialized border.
-
-
Meh Performance, but GREAT book, especially now.
- By M. Johnson on 12-17-24
-
Founding Brothers
- The Revolutionary Generation (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
- By: Joseph J. Ellis
- Narrated by: Bob Walter
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic - John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.
-
-
Great!
- By Gotta Tellya on 08-10-16
By: Joseph J. Ellis
-
Loon
- A Marine Story
- By: Jack McLean
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"Kids like me didn't go to Vietnam", writes Jack McLean in his must-listen memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. "Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war", he writes. It didn't remain that way for long.
-
-
Besides a production issue, excellent.
- By LEE on 05-02-19
By: Jack McLean
-
This Republic of Suffering
- Death and the American Civil War
- By: Drew Gilpin Faust
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During the Civil War, 620,000 soldiers lost their lives - equivalent to six million in today's population. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of the enormous death toll from material, political, intellectual, and spiritual angles. Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and describes how a deeply religious culture reconciled the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God.
-
-
a unique civil war perspective
- By D. Littman on 04-21-08
-
Lakota Woman
- By: Mary Crow Dog, Richard Erdoes
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the '60s and '70s.
-
-
Lakota Woman
- By Rachael on 05-14-20
By: Mary Crow Dog, and others
-
Empire of the Summer Moon
- Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
- By: S. C. Gwynne
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son, Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
-
-
Difficult to endure narrator
- By fowler on 12-21-19
By: S. C. Gwynne
-
American Revolutions
- A Continental History, 1750-1804
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell.
-
-
Best book on the American Revolution that I have read
- By Peter Stephens on 11-16-16
By: Alan Taylor
-
The Cold War
- A New History
- By: John Lewis Gaddis
- Narrated by: Jay Gregory, Alan Sklar
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.
-
-
WOW
- By Cordell eddings on 10-13-07
-
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
- By: Gordon S. Wood
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 19 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing 30 years of scholarship, Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer Prize–winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided between the nobility and "the Herd."
-
-
Changed the Way I Think
- By Cynthia on 01-04-14
By: Gordon S. Wood
-
Nature's Metropolis
- Chicago and the Great West
- By: William Cronon
- Narrated by: Jonah Cummings
- Length: 18 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
-
-
Moving
- By JB on 02-09-18
By: William Cronon
-
Unworthy Republic
- The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.
-
-
A Slow Burn
- By Hervé DuThé on 04-20-20
By: Claudio Saunt
What listeners say about Shadows at Dawn
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kindle Customer
- 02-19-22
an insightful, thoughtful, and powerful history
An unsparing look at a brutal and seminal moment in the wars between the Apache and nearly everybody else.
Jacoby's "Shadows at Dawn" explores in impressive detail, the history and aftermath of the 1871 "Massacre of Camp Grant" or the "Camp Grant Affair" (depending on who you ask) where 150 Apache (mostly women and children) were ambushed and killed by a combined group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono Indians at Camp Grant outside Tuscon Arizona.
There's nothing good that can be said about the attack and Jacoby never sugarcoats things. But Jacoby does an outstanding job challenging the popular narrative that all interactions with the Indian tribes were nothing more than "white atrocity" when the facts were far more complicated.
The constant ebb and flow between violence and peace (or rather, slightly less violence) among disparate Apache bands against the Spanish (later Mexican) authorities and settlers, American troops and settlers, and other Indian tribes culminated in a slow drawdown of American federal troop presence in Arizona following the Civil War, a settler population that could not rely on those Federal troops to take action against Apache (because the Federal Gov't often sided with the Apache following various treaties), and an emboldened Apache population that saw opportunity to exert power and influence over neighboring tribes (often brutally).
What's most interesting in Jacoby's history is that, despite Federal authorities (and Eastern press) decrying the massacre and being fairly uniform in its condemnation, how utterly unapologetic the locals around Tuscon were (white Americans, Mexicans, and Indians). For decades, they referred to it with pride or euphemistically as the "Camp Grant Affair." How much of this was intentional obfuscation or a sincere belief in the action isn't really possible to tease out (Jacoby does his best but narratives start to calcify after a while). Ultimately, that multiethnic collection of peoples that took part in the wars against the Apaches felt themselves completely justified in doing so in response to perceived savagery by the Apache. Just as the Apache felt completely justified in their responses to settler advancement and/or federal (be it Spanish/Mexican/American) perfidy.
"Shadows at Dawn" is an insightful, thoughtful, and powerful history that gives real depth (but not absolution) to all sides of a horrific event.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kindle Customer
- 09-29-22
Honest history
Should be required listening/reading for all Americans, and all others who wish to understand the truth of conquest and its horror. This has been repeated many times over in many lands throughout history. When will we learn.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Steve
- 02-14-22
You will rarely find history this well done ...
Karl Jacoby painstakingly deconstructs and analyzes a little-known but important massacre of in Arizona by looking at the same story from American, Mexican, and two different Indian perspectives. He then follows through as the consequences of the massacre reverberate through all four groups' histories after that. Outstanding narration as well. Highly recommended.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Stephen G. Scales
- 04-25-19
Everyone should read this book!
Great structure, narrative and understanding of American History and humanity. As a current graduate student and history teacher this book has opened may different avenues to the way I will be teaching and view all history I view and analyze in the future.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- robert
- 07-10-21
Excellent
I loved this book. The author does a great job of telling history in a compelling , factual and unbiased way. I found myself questioning my own versions of retold events because of this author. History is complicated, the dead inhabit another world. We must try to put ourselves in the shoes of all sides, read all accounts, look for bias and only then will we get closest to the truth.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- AHB
- 08-22-21
An excellent coverage of early Arizona History.
The narration of this period in early Arizona made this more like a storytelling than a book reading. This presentation was a triumph in enunciation and pronunciation. Hillgartner was exceptional, as was the content by Jacoby.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful