Who Is Heather Cox Richardson?
And why are so many people reading her newsletter?
At one of Sam’s campaign fundraisers in 2019, a supporter was talking to me with unusual insight about the day’s national politics. “Your view of the news makes it so much easier to swallow,” I told her. “What paper do you read?”
“Oh,” she said, “haven’t you heard about Heather Cox Richardson? I read her newsletter every morning. All of us do.”
Since that day, Sam and I have read Letters from an American every morning, often relating Dr. Richardson’s daily focus to our own Western North Carolina politics.
On December 27, 2020, Ben Smith interviewed her for the New York Times. The caption to the photo above says, “Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, is more or less by accident the most successful independent journalist in America.”
I would say her success is less by accident and more because of her passion for study and for teaching, her respect for trustworthy sources, and her desire to encourage discussion.
Smith writes about her,
She is writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.
To me, in her writing Richardson seems to say, “Yesterday we were here together in America and this is what happened.”