Person

Heather Cox Richardson

Related Excerpts

Empty speech bubbles emanating from people in an old house.

Popular History

What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
The American Vandal
Podcast
The American Vandal

Strategic Presentism & Resistance History

What's the difference? The episode opens with defenses of presentism by two literary critics and a reception history of "The Gilded Age" before turning to a critique of resistance history from within the discipline, and a response from a prominent historian, a consideration of the standpoint of resistance history, and why aren't there more literary critics on MSNBC?
Book cover of "The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920."

Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction: Abolitionist Democracy from 1865-1919

Sinha enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to by covering the end of the 19th century into the Progressive era with the 19th Amendment.
Nikki Haley, 2023.

Nikki Haley's Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP's Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.
The Freedmen’s Bureau drawn by A.R. Waud, 1868.

Social Welfare and the Politics of Race in the Post-Civil War South

The politicized rhetoric linking race and welfare has a long, ingrained history.
Political cartoon of the Lincoln Administration, reading "Running the 'Machine'", 1864.

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

How Lincoln's administration financed the Civil War and transformed the nation's decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the postwar centuries.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau on the phone, March 1985.

Calling Bob Morgenthau

The tensions between the Manhattan District Attorney and President George H.W. Bush.
Former President Donald Trump in Selma, North Carolina

The Historians Take a First Crack at Donald J. Trump

On the promises and perils of very recent history.
At the filling station and garage at Pie Town, New Mexico, in October 1940. Photo by Russell Lee, FSA/Library of Congress.

Cowboy Progressives

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed.
The GOP elephant depicted as falling apart

What Is Happening to the Republicans?

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.
6 Black Americans celebrating Juneteenth in 1900.

Reunion, Juneteenth and the Meaning of the Civil War

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?

The Most Dangerous American Idea

No belief in the history of the US has been more threatening to democracy than the certainty that only white people are fit for self-government.
Black men confront armed whites in a Chicago street.

Tying Black Resistance to Communism Is a Time-Tested American Tradition

When modern conservatives associate activists of color with communism, they’re drawing on a racist history that goes back over 100 years.
Mannequin modeling a prairie dress.

The Settler Fantasies Woven Into the Prairie Dresses

The fashion trend is shorn entirely of the racism and colonial entitlement it once cloaked.

The Racist History of the ‘Crisis Actor’ Attacks on Parkland School Shooting Survivors

Courageous Americans have been undermined by conspiracy theories for more than 150 years.