Historian and Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson has kept me (and tens of thousands of others) sane this year. I don’t watch the news, but I do my best to keep up with current events—which is exhausting at best and demoralizing at worst. Of course, my favorite news stories are the uplifting ones that star Super Awesome People™, but much of the news in 2020 has been anything-but-super-awesome.
Heather Cox Richardson
There’s a pandemic. And an economic crisis. And social unrest because of systemic racism and police violence. More than 160,000 Americans have died from a novel coronavirus that is still infecting tens of thousands of Americans everyday. Schools are trying to reopen even as businesses are shutting down. The American president is golfing and tweeting more than he’s confronting the nation’s problems, and the legislative branch is more dysfunctional than ever. There’s a presidential election in less than three months, and voters are being disenfranchised in more insidious ways than ever, with attacks on the USPS and mail-in-voting coming at a time when voting-in-person is a substantial health risk.
And that’s just the bad news coming out of America.
Fortunately, Heather Cox Richardson spends hours every day (and many sleepless nights) to give her Facebook subscribers a rundown of the day’s political news with a historical framing (and with quotes and sources for folks who want to verify her research). It’s an enormous undertaking that her 684k+ Facebook followers appreciate immensely as her daily posts are a way for us to catch up on what we may have missed in the news—and the context we need to understand its significance.
And that’s not all she does! She also makes videos, tweets, hosts podcasts, and writes newsletters, books, and articles…no wonder she never sleeps!
Ways to Learn More from Heather Cox Richardson
- Follow her on Facebook for daily posts about American political news.
- She also posts Facebook videos with series titled A History of the Republican Party, The American Paradox, and History & Politics Chat.
- Follow her on Twitter @HC_Richardson.
- Subscribe to her newsletter, Letters From an American, which includes the same daily posts from Facebook as well as additional content for paid subscribers.
- Read her political articles at The Guardian.
- Read her political articles at Salon.
- Read her history articles at We’re History.
- Listen to her history and politics podcast Freak Out and Carry On (cohosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Ron Suskind). The ~30 min podcast ran weekly from June 2017 to February 2018 and takes an in-depth look at the Trump administration’s first year through a historical lens.
- Buy her print books (here, here, here, here, and here) and her audio books (here).
Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson, for using your brilliant mind and tireless work ethic to keep us informed so we can be more engaged citizens of America, history, and democracy.