Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American
If I were forced to limit my input of news and current events to just a single source, I would undoubtedly choose Heather Cox Richardson’s nightly newsletter that chronicles the day’s events in the context of American History. What started as a Facebook page — where Heather wrote a daily post to her friends — grew into millions of followers. She eventually expanded to a Substack newsletter to reach an audience who preferred receiving a daily email. She continues to post to both places daily.
Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. (Wikipedia). She has described the purpose of her newsletter as leaving a record of what is happening for the historians who come after her 150 years in the future who will look back and try to understand what happened in America in the first half of the 21st century.
In Their Words…
Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.
To understand the present, we have to understand how we got here.
That’s where this newsletter comes in.
I’m a professor of American history. This is a chronicle of today’s political landscape, but because you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, this newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American.
These were the same questions a famous observer asked in a book of letters he published in 1782, the year before the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur called his book “Letters from an American Farmer.”
Like I say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.