Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacr torrent

Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre/Heather Cox Richardson/2011/EPUB/

English|Non-Fiction|ISBN-13: 978-0465025114|392pg|2.94MB


On December 29, 1890, five hundred American troops massed around hundreds of unarmed Lakota Sioux men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.

Outnumbered and demoralized, the Sioux posed no threat to the soldiers and put up no resistance.

But in a chaotic scene, the Americans opened fire with howitzers, killing nearly three hundred Sioux in what would become known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In this definitive account, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson shows that the origins of this quintessential American tragedy lay not in the West but in Washington, where would-be lawmakers, locked in a desperate midterm-election battle, sought to drum up votes through an age-old political tool: fear.

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and Plains Indians