I have been working on an essay about Heather Cox Richardson, easily the most popular and the most troubling historian of our times, for a long while. A recent episode of The Reckoning with Jason Herbert provided the impetus to finally finish it. I don’t offer what follows below as a historian but as a political and cultural commentator. If you think my reading of Richardson needs correcting, feel free to let me know. Just try not to be too “Jane, you ignorant slut” about it.
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Like millions of people, I began an unpaid subscription to Heather Cox Richardson’s deeply popular Substack, Letters from an American in the hopes of learning more about the historical events that brought us here. I am often described as an ultra leftist, and my politics are certainly far to the left of Richardson. I have very few illusions about the history of the United States, soaked as it is in genocide and slavery. Given the title of Richardson’s newsletter, I never expected much more than a liberal response to politics mired in an uncritical patriotism and a commitment to the idea that the problem with the United States today is simply that it has temporarily strayed from its righteous and true path. (Liberalism is the defense of the status quo, and liberals want nothing more than to return to brunch.)
Still, I thought I could learn a lot. Leftists have a tendency to be ahistorical: ask a Marxist to address a particular political problem and the response will be that you should think about the means of production — as if Karl Marx were, even now, still working in the Reading Room at the British Museum, leaving it every evening huddled into his threadbare coat as he walked home. We cannot means-of-production our way out of this particular historical moment, especially when trying to explain the importance of a leftist project to people who are not automatically on the left. Understanding how we got here requires us to tangle with the past by engaging honestly with conservatives and liberals as well as with the radical leftists we (might think) we understand. I felt that my understanding of history was too inadequate to meet the moment. (I’ve never been good at dates in particular, driving my history teachers to anguish because I simply made them up).
In the midst of political turmoil and a widespread sense of anxiety, Americans were struggling to come to terms with what they saw as vast changes in the country’s political and cultural makeup. Recognising historical patterns would have to be part of any movement forward, it seemed. Richardson, a trained historian who specialises in nineteenth-century American history, had been posting news and analyses of current events on Facebook since 2014. Encouraged by her followers there, she launched her newsletter five years later, and it is now that unicorn among Substacks, garnering, according to some estimates, around $1 million a month, by others, much more.1Contrary to public perception, the vast majority of Substacks make very little or no money at all.All her posts are free to the public, and the $5 a month subscriptions offer the sole advantage of being able to comment on her now daily newsletter. It is, to be fair, an enormously generous undertaking: the newsletter hits inboxes every day, she clearly reads and digests a lot, and she provides links to several news reports so that readers can confirm the course of events (posters on Twitter, who tend to announce breaking news or analyses with no links at all could learn from this.) She may be the most popular historian in the country, is certainly the richest, and a highly sought after speaker and interview subject. Richardson is something of a unicorn among academics as well, a rare instance of someone whose scholarly work has crossed over into the profitable public realm.
I thought I would at least get a better grounding in historical events. Instead, what arrived every day in my inbox was a reductive version of history, something more like A Child’s History of England, Charles Dickens’s account of how his country came to be, but for American adults who wanted clear distinctions between the goodies and the baddies and to be affirmed in their belief that America had simply momentarily strayed from some mythic, unsullied past from which it has temporarily fallen. After a while, I was fed up with Letters from an American and ended my subscription.
Richardson’s pattern in all her newsletters remains unchanged: she provides a snapshot of the news, and occasionally delves into some part of American history that supposedly sheds light on the current moment. The problem is that she is very selective in her presentation of history. Abraham Lincoln is a particular favourite of hers, and rendered as an almost cartoonishly perfect figure: in him Richardson has found the God of White Saviour Liberals, and she paints him as the great abolitionist who single-handedly and with great wisdom ended slavery. While she might, like a good liberal, condescendingly and brightly note the many Black and white radicals who worked on abolition, it’s with a cheery sense that Lincoln made it all possible. More critically, Richardson perpetuates the belief that “America” is inherently wedded to goodness and justice, and that Trump is an aberration. This is a deeply dangerous delusion. On Twitter, my comrade JL wrote, “The thing that is interesting and notable about the ‘historian’ Heather Cox Richardson is not what she writes. It’s what she leaves out.”
Charlotte Rosen writes in Protean:
“[…]Richardson argues that anti-Blackness, white settler expansionism, and the illiberal belief in the subhumanity of nonwhite people is incidental to the nation’s history, or is externalizable only to contemptible figures and political parties within it. Such a claim borders on historical malpractice. But allowing that the intellectual and material foundation of the United States is drenched in blood, of course, would undermine Richardson’s function of containing the problem of fascism into the narrow figure of Trump. Undoubtedly, this simplification—soothing and flattering to her liberal readership—makes her more legible to publishers and media outlets eager to heed her expert analysis and pay her handily for it.
Similarly, Richardson has, as far as I can tell, never addressed the ways in which various Democrat administrations enabled the regime of surveillance and incarceration that brought us to this current moment when people are being kidnapped and murdered in public. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement was founded in 2003, under George W. Bush, Democratic administrations had ample opportunity to either rein it in or dissolve it completely and — more importantly — could have facilitated real immigration reform. In fact, Bill and Hillary Clinton (in what was effectively a co-presidency) created a giant pool of undocumented immigrants. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), were both created in 1996. Together, the legislation increased the penalties for what were formerly relatively minor infractions and expanded the reach of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). For instance, before 1996, undocumented immigrants apprehended and imprisoned for crimes were released after serving their sentences. After 1996, they would remain in prison until deported. Minor offences, like driving under the influence or filing a false tax return would now be classified as “aggravated felonies” and place immigrants on the fast track to deportation. IIRIRA instituted the 3 and 10-year bars. This meant that immigrants who stayed in the U.S for a period of 6 months to a year or over a year would now be prevented from re-entry for 3 to 10 years, respectively.2At the same time, the Acts further criminalised American citizens: the same year saw the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, otherwise known as the Welfare Reform Act, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which cut benefits to the poorest, among them single mothers (mostlyAfrican Americans) and immigrants, both legal and undocumented.
Much of what we see today, in the shape of the extreme surveillance structure set in place to police the lives of the most vulnerable and the cruel belief that immigrants in particular should simply rot and die in hunger, can be traced back to the Clinton years. Ironically, George W. Bush was the last American president who made a genuine attempt to bring about immigration reform. If we look at everything going on right now through a history of the legislation that set events and changes in motion, we can understand the complicated ways in which our current time is a product of massive ideological failures on all sides. But in the Heather Cox Richardson view of the world, the Democrats are untouchable and nothing that they did to create the current crisis is ever to be mentioned. Everything is happening because of the evils of Trump and all the baddies of the past.
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If Donald Trump is now able to effectively (or not) deploy masked troops who maim, kill, and abduct people on the streets, all in the name of protecting American citizens from hordes of marauding invaders in the shape of immigrants, it is because he found a vast and inhumane network of surveillance and incarceration set in place by previous administrations, Republican and Democrat. He is not Voldemort, a mysterious figure who appeared out of the blue and began smashing all our systems: he is a politician using the tools already at his disposal.
None of this would be obvious to anyone who reads and takes seriously Richardson’s reductive takes on how we got to this moment.
The 2024 election of Donald Trump gave Richardson a second wind: suddenly, she was back in the centre of the maelstrom, ready to provide succour to wounded liberals who, once again, wrung their hands in despair and wondered how we had returned to the same spot. Her stock has climbed steadily, and she seems to be everywhere. I had continued to ignore her, taking hope in the fact that there is now a deepening sense among people that liberalism will no longer save us. And then she showed up on Reckoning with Jason Herbert.
Herbert’s series began as Historians at the Movies (HATM) in 2022, and it was exactly what the title hinted at: a group of historians gathering together to discuss a movie. I cannot recall exactly when I started listening to HATM, but I dove in with his episode on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I was struck by the fact that he had three women academics as guests, all Egyptologists, and my surprise was partly due to the fact that I have not encountered actual Egyptologists outside of Agatha Christie murder mysteries like Death on the Nile. I began devouring the podcast. In May 2025, Herbert renamed it The Reckoning in order to expand to more than discussions about movies (he still talks about them and hosts an ongoing online Watch Party series).
Herbert is, like Richardson, a trained historian and academic and his relationship to academia is an unusual one: descended from catfish anglers in the South, he dropped out of college twice, finished at Tallahassee Community College at 31, went on to get a Masters at Wichita State University and received a doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 2022, as a man with two children in his 40s. (He often refers to these biographical details on the podcast.) Unlike many other podcasts that feature academics, Reckoning does not focus solely on Ivy League or other private university figures as the ultimate authorities and, instead, demonstrates that there is a rich, vibrant world of scholarship emerging from and grounded in both public and private universities that are not as well known as, say, Harvard or Yale. In fact, as we learn from listening to several episodes, some areas of study — such as Cherokee history (in an episode with the historian Julia Reed) — are best undertaken in specific regions because scholars need to locate their research within local communities and archives. What makes Reckoning an especially welcome departure from the average podcast on academic topics is that it does not discuss them in jargon-riddled language, and does not assume that its average listener is either a dunce who needs everything spelt out or too smart to need some terms explained. It’s unusual to find a podcast that can strike that balance.
Reckoning is also significant because it affirms to people from what universities refer to as “non-traditional” backgrounds (not middle or upper class, often not white, first-generation) a sense that academia is not meant just for the elites. Herbert and his guests will often explicitly discuss issues of class, gender, and race — all of which are bigger complications for non-traditional students who don’t always have mentors or families guiding them through their university experience. In an episode on Thelma and Louise with the academics Jacki Antonovich and Lauren MacIvor Thompson, both women talk about the pressures on female academics to adhere to gendered norms about how they should comport themselves and even what hair colour is most suitable (blondes have a harder time being seen as intellectuals, for instance, even in contemporary academia).
Given that Reckoning is a history podcast, I fully expected that Heather Cox Richardson would someday land there as a guest. In the last half-decade, history professors and departments everywhere have cosied up to her in sometimes overly deferential terms. After all, she is their dream come true: a historian famous for her work who also makes more money than the average academic — even the ones at Ivy Leagues — can imagine. I heard her name referenced a few times on older episodes of the podcast, each time with that same reverence accorded to her everywhere else. I simply rolled my eyes and kept listening.
Richardson finally appeared on the February 12 episode of Reckoning, where she and Herbert discussed the 2012 horror film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. At an hour and forty-five minutes, it may be his longest episode ever, but that seems fitting given her superstar status. It transpires that the two are friends who have known each other for a few years and, of course, Herbert expresses his admiration for her as both a scholar and a person. The first half hour is fairly interesting as the two chat about the ordeals of writing regularly and how to get through it, and we learn about their ongoing book projects. The rest of the episode is what can be expected from Richardson, given that she is commenting on a figure, Lincoln, often referred to as The Great Emancipator, about whom she is never critical in any way. As far as can be gleaned from Wikipedia, the movie is a hagiographic retelling of the president and even invents a meeting between him and Harriet Tubman (the two never met in real life). The plot centres around Lincoln waging a battle against vampires whom Richardson reads as the original slave owners. The rest of her analysis is predictable and, once again, as is typical of her work, situates slavery as a product of the minds of evil people.
Richardson is little more than the contemporary communications director for liberalism, so there is no point in further exploring what she has to say about the film. The more disappointing feature of this episode is that Herbert is not able to draw even a mild critique of Lincoln from Richardson even though he asks her, at least twice, to expand on how Lincoln might be a complicated figure. Each time, Richardson ignores the hint and sticks to her guns: the man was an exemplary hero, and there is nothing negative at all to be said about him.
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If this were a more typical podcast, with a group of mainstream, stuffy academics sniffing on about the glories of The Great Emancipator, we could just ignore the episode as yet another typical historian’s take. But this discussion, such as it was, came about on The Reckoning which has historically — no pun intended — been implicitly and explicitly about making it clear that history as a discipline and as an approach to the world requires a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. It’s not that The Reckoning is perfect in every way and Herbert — a white man — tends to be overly deferential towards Black guests and other participants of colour. (Given the current social media-driven climate, though, it’s fair to say that even a mildly critical stance, the tiniest bit of questioning, could result in an explosion of attempts to quickly cancel him.) But its greatest value is in asserting that literally anyone can and should engage in serious historical study and analysis, and that history is a tool with which we understand the past in order to remedy the present and create better futures.
Richardson’s liberal worship of Lincoln also involves a white saviour’s attitude toward those whom he emancipated, and her inability — her refusal — to entertain even a mildly contrarian view of him reveals the very real danger of the historical project she has undertaken, one that could subvert any possibility of change (to render him “complicated” is the mildest form of critique). It represents the failure of the liberal imagination to imagine more than simply restoring power structures to their original state, which is all that her political project aims for. More disturbingly, Richardson’s liberal dogma indicates to aspiring or junior historians that this kind of tepid, whitewashed version of history is not only hugely successful and profitable but the only kind that will be tolerated in the upper echelons of academia.
Heather Cox Richardson is seen, especially by liberals who still control too many cultural and political institutions, as someone who speaks truth to power. If that “truth” is nothing more than a recovery and bolstering of the status quo, whose power is being destabilised? Is Richardson speaking truth to power or is she, like a classic liberal, simply waiting until her kind returns to power over the rest of us?
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See also:
Who’s Left?: A Taxonomy of Sorts
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
A Better Son Or Daughter: Donald Trump, amnesia, and a capitalist fable
The New York Times Is The Daily Prophet
Charlotte E. Rosen’s “The End of Resistance History” contextualises Richardson’s work as a historian.
Nathan J. Robinson’s “Does Democracy Mainly Mean Voting For Democrats?” examines Richardson’s erasure of Democratic failures.3Added March 2. Nathan writes a lot and I’d somehow missed this essay.
Image: Wiki
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