A good book about this phenomenon is Phillip Zimbardo’s write up of his Stanford Prison Experiment. It came out in 2007 and is called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil.

One of his main points is it is not so much a few bad apples that turn a situation, rather it is the apple basket that is bad. I think Massacre at Mountain Meadows attempt to show this by spending a lot of time detailing the “perfect storm” of politics, history, religion, and rhetoric that led to the events of September 11th.

Another point made is that common attitude held by good people that they are far removed from the people of these events. As in the belief I would never have done that. The Milgram experiment and the SPE, among others, show that ordinary people in the right environment can commit terrible atrocities.

seems to invite selective, spectulative, and even plain invented depictions of historical events and characters

This is true. Of course, I have found few historical works that do not engage, to some degree, in selectivity, speculation, and invention. I think that historical fiction and fictive history can both be useful to the degree that readers understand the aims and limitations of each genre and are prepared and willing to critically evaluate what they read.

Quinn discusses the events in the former Yugoslavia and Milosevic reign of terror. How people who had lived together for fifty plus years as neighbors and friends and then the Serbs started killing the Muslims in the most horrific ways. Why, because Milosevic was able through rhetoric to turn it into an “us” versus “them” state. Quinn’s model is brilliant and I suggest reading his “culture of violence” in “Mormon Hierarchy II”. Some of the historical work has already become dated, but the model found on page 260 second paragraph is absolutely brilliant.

Faragher also made some interesting comments as well. His discussion on violence towards Indians was quite interesting and his discussion about John D. Lee’s participation in the Massacre at Bad Ax was mind expanding. The authors of the new book call it a Battle, when in fact it was as horrible as the massacre at the Meadows. After his comments I could not help but think that it took a Lee to carry out the massacre. Young, Haight and Dame did not have the stomach for a massacre. Young, as Bill MacKinnon shows so well in “At Swords Point”, could give orders for killing but then gets ill shortly after when tragedy struck. Dame and Haight made sure they were as far away from the meadows as they could be and still get the details. They would also give a show for everyone by crying like a baby or sending out messengers saying “don’t kill the emigrants”. It seems the only other person capable of the massacre was Higbee and you have to wonder what rock he crawled out from under.

Faragher did not comment on the problem that this massacre is unique and does not fit his model. This was a case of whites massacring whites. As Quinn points out this was done by a religious body who lived in a theocracy. As Ardis Parshall and Paul Reeve point out in their review of “Blood of the Prophets” many people who visited Utah and compared it to other places in the west saw a much different society, here is Franklin A. Buck’s experience: “In Pioche we have two courts, any number of sheriffs and police officers and a jail to force people to do what is right. There is a fight every day and a man killed about every week. About half the town is whisky shops and houses of ill fame. In these Mormon towns there are no courts, no prisons, no saloons, no bad women; but there is a large brick Church and they keep the Sabbath—a fine schoolhouse and all the children go to school. All difficulties between each other are settled by the Elders and the Bishop. Instead of every man trying to hang his neighbor, they all pull together. There is only one store on the co-operative plan and all own shares and it is really wonderful to see what fine towns and the wealth they have in this barren country. It shows what industry and economy will do when all work together.” As both Will Bagley and David Bigler point out “Cedar City was no Dodge City”.

I’m not familiar with The Killer Angels, but the linked Wikipedia entry notes it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. So I suppose that whatever can be done right in historical fiction is exemplified by that book. The entry also notes that the book inspired Joss Whedon to create the Firefly series, which may be the greatest single accomplishment of the genre.