This History Professor Is Completely Killing It on Social Media
Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" is a daily must-read.
Heather Cox Richardson is my history hero. She is the author of the wildly popular Substack and Facebook accounts called “Letters from an American,” and she is my guest on this week’s Write About Now Podcast.
Like millions of others, I first discovered Dr. Richardson in my Facebook feed talking about the 2020 election in a live video. Wearing glasses, a preppy wool sweater, and I suspect LL Bean duck boots, she broadcast from her study in Maine framed by an old oak bookshelf loaded with massive scholarly history texts.
Her surroundings and persona screamed East Coast elite intellectual—and, in part, she is guilty as charged. Dr. Richardson teaches 19th Century American History at Boston College. But she is anything but a pretentious and pedantic professor. Rather, she has a gift for making current events come alive through the lens of history. After reading her posts, I always feel a little more informed and intelligent.
Then I forget everything 20 minutes later.
I’d been looking for an engaging writer to help me better understand this precarious time, and Dr. Richardson was the perfect tonic for my gin. After watching all her Facebook videos, I went further down the Richardson rabbit hole and discovered that she had a newsletter precisely like this one on Substack.
The only difference is that she posts six times a week and has tens of thousands of paid subscribers (Substack does not share actual numbers), who—like me—gladly pay her $5 a month for her work.
Dr. Richardson’s success has made her an unlikely star of the platform, beating out such heavy-weight journalists as Matt Taibbi, Barri Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Roxanne Gay.
In our interview, we talk about why she decided to write for the masses, the trouble with the media today, how she comes up with her daily topics, and who she imagines her audience is. We also do a deep dive into the current state of chaos in the U.S. I ask if this time is unprecedented in our history, and her answer may surprise you.
I hope you find the conversation as stimulating as I did. For the full effect, I recommend you listen to it sitting in a cracked leather chair by a roaring fire, sipping a single-malt Scotch.