Heather Cox Richardson is an American 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 six books on history and politics. In 2014, she founded a popular history website, werehistory.org. Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On. More recently, Richardson started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history. The newsletter accrued over one million subscribers, making her, as of December 2020, the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack. Richardson also co-hosts the podcast Now & Then with fellow historian Joanne B. Freeman. In February 2022, Richardson interviewed U.S. President Joe Biden.
Early life and education
Born in Chicago in 1962 and raised in Maine, Richardson attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. She received both her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she studied under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp.
Writing career
The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997) Richardson’s first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997), stemmed from her dissertation at Harvard University. Inspired by Eric Foner’s work on pre-Civil War Republican ideology, Richardson analyzed Republican economic policies during the war. She contended that their efforts to create an activist federal government during the Civil War marked a continuation of Republican free labor ideology. These policies, such as war bonds and greenbacks or the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act, revolutionized the role of the federal government in the U.S. economy. At the same time, these actions laid the groundwork for the Republican Party's shift to big business after the Civil War.
According to Professor James L. Huston at Oklahoma State University: For nineteenth-century political historians, this will be an important book with crucial insights into the nature of the Republican Party. Richardson's attention to political economy offers a refreshing vantage point from which to assess Civil War legislation, and her willingness to delve deeply into economic doctrines is commendable. Not the least of her accomplishments is a more realistic appraisal of the Republicans, revealing their agricultural bias and their distrust of monopoly and hierarchy.... At times, Richardson's discussion of economic principles is insightful and perceptive; at other times the discussion is shallow and requires more refinement.
The Death of Reconstruction (2001) Four years later, Richardson extended her study of Republican policy into the postwar period with The Death of Reconstruction (2001). Unlike other historians, she focused her analysis of the period on the "Northern abandonment of Reconstruction". Building on the earlier work of C. Vann Woodward, she argued that a more complete understanding of the period required appreciation of class, not only race. As Reconstruction continued into the 1870s and especially the 1880s, Republicans began to view African Americans in the South more from a class perspective and less from the perspective of race that had driven their earlier humanitarianism. In the midst of the labor struggles of the Gilded Age, Republicans came to compare "the demands of the ex-slaves for land, social services, and civil rights" to the demands of white laborers in the North. This ideological shift was the key to Republican abandonment of Reconstruction, as they chose the protection of their economic and business interests over their desire for racial equality.
According to Professor Michael W. Fitzgerald, at St. Olaf College: "The Death of Reconstruction" is an important book on a big topic. It offers a full-scale reinterpretation of the great betrayal of the Civil War's egalitarian legacy, the northern public's abandonment of the freedpeople. If the book is not uniformly persuasive, that partially reflects the scope of its ambition.