12/29/2010 First Person Radio

Professor Richardson's hour with us was an amazing blend of recounting the horror of December 29, 1890 and examining both the local and national politics that fed first the boredom, then the ramped-up paranoia among soldiers and settlers stationed there that spawned the killings of 300 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in what became South Dakota.

Richardson is an expert in late nineteenth-century America. She is the author of several books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including, most recently, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (Yale, 2007), andWounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic, 2010).

A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 2004, Richardson’s last three books were selected by the History Book Club; West from Appomattox was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection.