Substack sensation and historian Heather Cox Richardson
The idea that history is “just one damned thing after another” may be witty, but it’s also untrue. History is not just a collection of “prominent events” and “great men” as the line seems to imply. History is a story — thousands of stories actually — selected and woven into coherent narratives by historical researchers.
Historians are always coming up with their interpretations of the past to understand the present and sometimes to glimpse the future. One of the bestknown historians today is the Maine-based scholar Heather Cox Richardson. I’m a big fan.
Richardson lives in Round Pond (Lincoln County) Maine. She is the professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches 19th-century American history. She has written several scholarly books on the Civil War, Appomattox, Reconstruction, Wounded Knee, the Republican Party and Democracy.
Born in Chicago, Richardson moved to Maine when she was in elementary school. She subsequently enrolled in and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and then went on to earn her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. While a grad student at Harvard, she studied under two of the country’s most notable Civil War scholars: David Donald and William Gienapp. I have to think, however, that Richardson’s reputation now exceeds that of either of her late professors.
Her current fame is due largely to Substack, where she began publishing her online essays four years ago. Her blog, “Letters from an American,” was developed in response to questions people were asking about the confusion rampant in the country at the time [https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/]. Reading these letters makes you feel she is writing them to you individually. She also holds occasional conversations on Facebook.
As of December 2020, her online newsletter had attracted over a million subscribers, making her the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack. Her almost daily essays on the platform are wide-ranging, timely, carefully researched and admirably written.
Just to offer an illustration of her range of topics, consider last week’s output: Lincoln (Monday), Trump (Tuesday), Organized Labor (Wednesday), the Kennedy Assassination (Thursday), Thanksgiving (Friday), the Letters Project (Saturday) and Israel/Hamas (Sunday). She rarely misses a day. As someone who writes one column every two weeks, I don’t know how she does it.
Richardson has taken this year off from teaching to complete her just-published book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” The Boston Globe calls Richardson a “celebrity historian.” You really ought to read her because she has a lot of insight into our history as well as our current situation.
Speaking of her own political affiliation, Richardson has called herself a “Lincoln Republican.” She is not a Democrat but is also not comfortable with the contemporary Republican party. This stance suggests that her politics is derived from her careful study of history rather than from ideology. She writes knowledgeably about democracy, equality and the importance of the rule of law.
Her books and her blog posts are grounded in facts about what happened in history. Her writing is accessible while also conveying her rigorous scholarship. The new book contains some 300 footnotes in support of what she has to say. What she writes is not journalistic and it is not polemical. It is history produced by a gifted public intellectual.
The first 10 chapters of “Democracy Awakening” explain how democracy has been undermined in America since the 1930s by business interests opposed to Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“They insisted,” she writes, “that a government that answered to the needs of ordinary Americans was a dangerous, radical experiment.” Some people continue to believe this.
The second section describes the rise of authoritarianism in America starting with Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president. It puts Russia, Charlottesville, January 6 and “the Big Lie” in context.
The third section describes the intention and the accomplishment of the Founders and our foundational documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This section ends with the challenge of reclaiming our country from forces that have resisted ideas such as the notion that “all men are created equal” and what that means today.
“Democracy Awakening” is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how we got here and where we are headed. In the end, Richardson relies on her political hero, Abraham Lincoln. She explains how the country experienced similar perils before. And, most importantly, how we did and how we can survive them again.