Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson is an American academic historian, author, and educator.

She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians.

She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Richardson has authored seven books on history and politics.

This book studied the entire life of the Republican Party, from its inception in the 1850s through the presidency of George W. Bush.

Believing a small group of men who controlled all three branches of government were turning the country into a slavocracy, the party’s founders united against "slave power".

These Republicans articulated a new vision of an America in which all hardworking men could rise.

But after the Civil War, Republicans began to emulate what they originally opposed.

They tied themselves to powerful bankers and industrialists, sacrificing the well-being of ordinary Americans.

A similar process took place after World War II, when Republicans sought to dismantle successful New Deal policies and prop up the wealthy.

However, in both cases, reformers within the party were able to return the party to its founding vision of equality of opportunity, first Theodore Roosevelt during the Progressive Era, and then Dwight D. Eisenhower, who enforced integration and maintained the New Deal.

The Nixon and Reagan administrations represented yet another fall from the party's founding purpose.

It is ironic, Richardson points out, that Republicans treated Barack Obama with an unprecedented level of disrespect, as Obama's rise from humble beginnings to the highest office in the nation embodied the vision of the original Republicans.

In a new afterword, Richardson also points out the irony of one of the rioters storming the Capitol carrying the Confederate flag on January 6, 2021, despite the Republican Party starting in the 1850s as a popular movement against the men who would lead the Confederate States of America.

Born in Chicago in 1962 and raised in Maine, Richardson attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.

She received both her BA and PhD from Harvard University, where she studied under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp.

Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010), focused on the U.S. Army's slaughter of Native Americans in South Dakota in 1890.

She argued that party politics and opportunism led to the Wounded Knee Massacre.

After a bruising midterm election, President Benjamin Harrison needed to shore up his support.

In To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014), Richardson extended her study of the Republican Party into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 2014, she co-founded a history website, werehistory.org, where she was a co-editor.

Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On.

In 2019, Richardson started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history.

In September 2019, Richardson began writing a daily synopsis of political events associated with the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

Originally posting late every evening or in the early hours of the next day on her Facebook page, Richardson later moved to add a newsletter format, entitled "Letters from an American", published via Substack.

The newsletter deals with contemporary events she explicates and relates to historical developments.

The newsletter became popular because of her calm voice, with straightforward explanations of the news of the day.

The newsletter accrued over one million subscribers, making her, as of December 2020, the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack.

As of December 2020, Richardson was "the most successful individual author of a paid publication on... Substack" and on track to bring in a million dollars of revenue a year.

The newsletter received a "Best of Boston" award for "2021 Best Pandemic Newsletter" from Boston magazine.

In 2023, Richardson published her seventh book, entitled Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America that she characterized as having grown from writings she began in 2019 and subsequent interactions with her readers.

Those writings deal with discussion of contemporary events Richardson relates to historical developments and that were moved from postings on Facebook to her newsletter entitled Letters from an American and published, almost daily, on Substack.

Richardson co-hosted the podcast Now & Then with fellow historian Joanne B. Freeman.

In February 2022, Richardson interviewed U.S. President Joe Biden.

In How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020), Richardson argued that America was founded with contradicting ideals, with the ideas of liberty, equality, and opportunity on one hand, and slavery and hierarchy on the other.

United States victory in the American Civil War should have settled that tension forever, but at the same time that the Civil War was fought, Americans also started moving into the West.

In the West, Americans found, and expanded upon, deep racial hierarchies, meaning that hierarchical values survived in American politics and culture despite the crushing defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy.

Those traditions—a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color—have found a home in modern conservative politics, leaving the promise of America unfulfilled.

Dana Elizabeth Weiner of Wilfrid Laurier University states:"With this beautifully written book, prominent US historian Heather Cox Richardson offers valuable insights to historians and general readers about the tenacity of oligarchy in American politics since the seventeenth century."

Deborah M. Liles, a professor at Tarleton State University states: "Heather Cox Richardson's skill with connecting events into a cohesive narrative is on full display in this brilliant study.... [S]he dismantles the concept of equality guaranteed in the Constitution, connects western ideology with that of the Old South, and demonstrates how oligarchs and those who supported them established restrictions within society to retain their power."