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Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre. By Heather Cox Richardson. (New York: Basic, 2010. x, 363 pp. $28.95, ISBN 978-0-465-00921-3.)
Heather Cox Richardson is well positioned to bring new perspectives to the Wounded Knee massacre. In The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (1997) and The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-190 1 (2001), Richardson offered innovative interpretations of Civil War and Reconstruction history. Her third book, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007), expanded our understanding of Reconstruction beyond the conventional North-South axis to include the American West as a crucial site for working out national tensions. In her new book, Richardson again links the West and the East, arguing that the "road to the massacre [began] in Washington" when President Benjamin Harrison ordered troops to the Sioux reservations in mid-November 1890. The "fate" of rhose killed at Wounded Knee on December 29 "was sealed by politicians a thousand or more miles from the rolling hills and cathedral clouds of the Great Plains" (p. 18).
As would be expected, Richardson covers the conflicts between the United States and the Lakota Sioux in the 1860s and 1870s, the Lakotas' confinement to reservations in the late 1870s and 1880s, and a portion of the tribes embrace of the Ghost Dance in the late 1880s. Previous historians have placed these developments in a national context by discussing Manifest Destiny, western expansion, and federal Indian policy. Richardson, however, focuses on party politics, especially che Harrison...