Heather Cox Richardson

Based on Wikipedia: Heather Cox Richardson

The History Professor Who Became America's Most-Read Political Commentator

Every night, sometime around midnight, millions of Americans receive an email. It's not from a cable news network, a major newspaper, or a political campaign. It's from a sixty-two-year-old history professor who lives in a small coastal town in Maine, married to a lobsterman, writing from her home about what happened in America that day.

Her name is Heather Cox Richardson, and with over 2.6 million subscribers, her newsletter "Letters from an American" has become one of the most widely read political publications in the country. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the same as the print circulation of the New York Times and Washington Post combined.

How does a historian end up with an audience larger than most major media outlets? The answer lies in a peculiar American hunger—not for more news, but for someone to explain what the news actually means.

A Career Built on Understanding Power

Richardson wasn't always a public figure. For most of her career, she was a specialist's specialist—an academic historian focused on nineteenth-century America, particularly the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the American West. She studied at Harvard under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp, two giants in the field of Civil War history, and went on to teach at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst before landing at Boston College.

Her scholarly work asked a specific question that she would return to again and again: How do small groups of wealthy, powerful people manage to dominate democracies? And more pointedly: How do they convince ordinary people to support policies that benefit only the elite?

This wasn't abstract theorizing. Richardson traced these patterns through the actual mechanics of American politics—through the Republican Party's transformation from an antislavery movement into the party of big business, through the betrayal of formerly enslaved people during Reconstruction, through the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee.

Seven Books, One Argument

Richardson has written seven books, and while they span different eras and topics, they're really chapters in a single argument about American democracy.

Her first book, "The Greatest Nation of the Earth," published in 1997, examined how the Republican Party during the Civil War transformed the federal government. Before the war, the federal government was a modest operation. After it, thanks to policies like war bonds, a national currency, land-grant colleges, and the Homestead Act, the government became an engine for economic development. But Richardson noticed something troubling: these same policies that expanded opportunity also laid the groundwork for the Republican Party's later alliance with big business.

"The Death of Reconstruction," published in 2001, tackled one of the great tragedies of American history. After the Civil War, the federal government briefly attempted to guarantee the rights of formerly enslaved African Americans. Then it stopped. Why?

Most historians had focused on Southern resistance. Richardson looked North instead. She argued that as labor struggles intensified during the Gilded Age—that era of extreme inequality in the late 1800s—Northern Republicans began to see the demands of Black Southerners for land, education, and civil rights as uncomfortably similar to the demands of white workers in their own cities. They chose to protect their economic interests over their commitment to racial equality. Class, not just race, explains why Reconstruction failed.

"Wounded Knee," published in 2010, told the story of the 1890 massacre in which U.S. Army soldiers killed hundreds of Lakota people in South Dakota. Richardson's argument was characteristically political: the massacre happened because President Benjamin Harrison, reeling from a bad midterm election, replaced experienced Indian agents with political cronies who panicked over the Ghost Dance spiritual movement and called in the military. The army, worried about budget cuts, sent a third of its entire force. After the killing, Republicans spun the massacre as a heroic battle to avoid giving ammunition to their Democratic opponents.

Politics, in other words, got people killed.

The South Won After All

Richardson's most provocative argument came in her 2020 book, "How the South Won the Civil War." The title is deliberately jarring. Didn't the North win? Didn't slavery end?

Yes. But Richardson argues that America was founded with a fundamental contradiction. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, but the Constitution protected slavery. The Civil War should have resolved this tension permanently—and in the South, it did. The Confederacy was crushed, slavery was abolished, and for a brief moment it looked like American democracy might actually mean what it said.

But here's the twist: while the Civil War was being fought, Americans were also moving West. And in the West, they built new hierarchies. They pushed Native Americans onto reservations. They imported Chinese laborers and then passed laws excluding them. They created economic systems where a few wealthy men controlled vast resources while ordinary workers had little power.

The values of the old slaveholding South—hierarchy, concentrated wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color—found a new home in the American West. And from there, Richardson argues, they filtered into modern conservative politics. The Confederacy lost the war but its ideas survived, just in a different zip code.

The Republican Party's Strange Journey

"To Make Men Free," published in 2014, traced the entire history of the Republican Party from its founding in the 1850s through the George W. Bush administration. It's a story of repeated cycles: the party starts with idealistic principles, achieves power, becomes corrupted by wealthy interests, and then either reforms itself or doubles down on serving the elite.

The party began as a movement against what its founders called "slave power"—the idea that a small group of wealthy slaveholders had hijacked the federal government. These early Republicans believed in what they called "free labor": the principle that any hardworking person should be able to rise through their own efforts.

But after the Civil War, Republicans allied themselves with bankers and industrialists. The party of Lincoln became the party of robber barons. Reformers like Theodore Roosevelt temporarily reversed this trend during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. Later, moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, Jacob Javits, and Nelson Rockefeller maintained the New Deal programs that provided a safety net for ordinary Americans.

Then came Nixon. Then Reagan. Then, in Richardson's telling, the party abandoned its founding principles entirely.

Richardson points out an irony so sharp it almost hurts: Barack Obama, who rose from humble beginnings to the presidency through education and hard work, embodied exactly the kind of success story that the original Republicans celebrated. Instead of embracing him, the modern Republican Party treated him with unprecedented disrespect.

And then there's the image that haunts her 2021 afterword: a rioter storming the Capitol on January 6th while carrying a Confederate flag. The party founded to oppose the Confederacy had come full circle.

The Newsletter That Changed Everything

In September 2019, something was happening in Washington that Richardson found she couldn't ignore. The House of Representatives had launched an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Richardson started posting on Facebook, offering late-night summaries of each day's developments, placing them in historical context.

The response was overwhelming. People were hungry for exactly this: not partisan cheerleading, not cable news shouting, but someone who could explain how the current moment connected to patterns in American history. Someone who could say, in effect, "This has happened before, and here's what we can learn from it."

Richardson moved her writing to Substack, a platform for independent newsletters, and called it "Letters from an American"—a nod to the long tradition of American writers using the epistolary form to comment on politics, going back to the founding era.

By December 2020, she was the most successful individual author on Substack, on track to earn a million dollars a year from subscriptions. Boston magazine gave her newsletter a "Best of Boston" award for "Best Pandemic Newsletter." By January 2024, about 1.3 million people were reading each edition. By July 2025, she had 2.6 million subscribers on Substack and 3.2 million followers on Facebook.

The Nation described her voice as "sincere, humble, approachable, and jargon-free." That last quality matters enormously. Academic historians often write for other academics, in prose so dense it might as well be in code. Richardson writes for everyone.

The Hazards of Nightly Deadlines

Writing about current events every single night carries risks that writing about the nineteenth century does not. Historical events are settled; you can research them thoroughly before committing to an interpretation. The news is chaos, full of incomplete information and deliberate misinformation.

In 2025, following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Richardson wrote that the alleged killer "was not someone on the left" and "appears to have embraced the far right." Prosecutors later presented evidence that challenged this characterization. Richardson acknowledged that she had "included that one sentence based on what we knew at the time."

Eric Levitz, a correspondent for Vox, wrote that Richardson's post "illustrates the hazards of tribalistic thinking." It's a fair criticism, and it points to the tension at the heart of Richardson's project. She's a historian trying to make sense of events in real time, which is a bit like trying to write the history of a building while it's still being constructed. Sometimes the scaffolding looks like the final structure, but it isn't.

"Democracy Awakening"

Richardson's seventh book, "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America," published in 2023, grew directly out of her newsletter. It examines what she calls the roots of fascism in American history—not fascism as a foreign import, but as something with deep American precedents.

Her argument is that Trump was not an aberration but an inevitability. For seventy years, she contends, the Republican Party had been moving toward an embrace of Christian nationalism, racism, and corporate power. Trump was simply the logical endpoint of that trajectory.

As she describes the book's purpose: "to reclaim both American history and language about who we are, and to argue that authoritarians rise by perverting that language and that history."

This is Richardson's fundamental insight, the thread that runs through all her work: authoritarians don't just seize power through force. They seize it through narrative. They tell stories about who the "real" Americans are, about who deserves prosperity and who deserves punishment, about what the country's history means. To fight authoritarianism, you have to fight those stories with better ones—stories that are actually true.

The Historian as Public Intellectual

Richardson occupies a peculiar role in American public life. She's not a journalist, though she writes about the news. She's not a pundit, though she offers opinions. She's not a politician, though she clearly cares about political outcomes. She describes herself as a "Lincoln-era Republican"—which is to say, a member of a party that no longer exists—and claims no affiliation with any current political party.

Her influence has been recognized with a dizzying array of honors. In 2021, Forbes put her on its "50 over 50" list. In 2022, USA Today named her one of its Women of the Year. In 2023, The Guardian called her "the single most important progressive pundit since Edward P. Morgan"—a reference to the mid-twentieth-century radio commentator who brought liberal analysis to the airwaves during the civil rights era. In 2024, she received the Authors Guild Foundation's Baldacci Award for Literary Activism. In 2025, Time magazine named her to its Time100 Creators list.

She also co-hosted a podcast called "Now & Then" with fellow historian Joanne Freeman, and another called "Freak Out and Carry On" for NPR. In February 2022, she interviewed President Joe Biden—a sign of how far she'd traveled from the academic conference circuit.

The Lobsterman's Wife

There's something almost too perfect about the personal details of Richardson's life. She grew up in Maine, attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, earned three degrees from Harvard, taught at MIT. But she returned to Maine, to a small coastal town in Lincoln County. In 2022, she married Buddy Poland, a lobsterman.

It's an image that writes itself: the Harvard-educated historian and the working man who pulls his living from the sea, together in a state that has become one of America's bellwethers—rural, aging, politically divided, economically anxious. Richardson writes about ordinary Americans and their struggles with power. She's married to one.

She has three children from a previous marriage. She writes her newsletter late at night, after the day's news has settled but before it's been fully processed by the morning papers. Millions of people go to sleep having read her words, having been told a story about what kind of country America is and what kind of country it might become.

The Unfinished Promise

Richardson's work circles around a central question that Americans have been arguing about since 1776: Is this country actually going to be a democracy, or is it going to be an oligarchy dressed up in democratic language?

The original sin, in her telling, is the contradiction between the Declaration's promise of equality and the Constitution's protection of slavery. The Civil War should have resolved that contradiction. Reconstruction tried to make the promise real. But then the North got tired, the West provided new venues for hierarchy, and wealthy men found new ways to convince ordinary people that democracy was dangerous.

Richardson doesn't think this story is over. That's why she keeps writing, night after night, trying to help her readers see the patterns, understand the stakes, and recognize that what happens next is not predetermined. History is not a fixed track but a series of choices. Americans have chosen badly before. They can choose differently.

Whether you find Richardson's analysis persuasive probably depends on your own politics. But her popularity suggests that millions of Americans share her hunger—not for more information, which the internet provides in overwhelming abundance, but for someone who can make sense of it all. Someone who can connect today's headline to yesterday's history and tomorrow's possibilities.

That's what a historian does, after all. They tell stories about the past. The question is whether those stories can help us navigate the present. Every night, from a coastal town in Maine, Heather Cox Richardson bets that they can.