Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains her Substack blog's mission to reveal long-term societal levers, contrasting the 1763–1776 ideological revolution with military conflict where only 40% were patriots. She critiques Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction for pardoning Confederates and links Wounded Knee to Republican Senate maneuvering, while promoting her book Democracy Awakening regarding eroding checks and balances. Richardson rejects direct government service to maintain historical objectivity, citing the U-2 affair as a pivotal trust erosion moment. Ultimately, she argues that American progress stems from contradictions like Jefferson's slavery, driven by excluded groups expanding democratic boundaries despite current polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Printing Names in Baltimore00:02:57
And so Congress retreated to Baltimore and it needed to get out word desperately that the Declaration had been made.
It was the rallying cry for independence.
And you have to remember, things were dicey then.
Only about 40% would identify themselves as patriots.
There were loyalists.
There were people who wanted to stay out of it.
They needed to get the news out, and so they went to the local printer who would always publish printed by M.K. Goddard at the bottom of the newspaper.
YMK, for probably pretty obvious reasons, didn't want to disclose that it was a woman.
But when it came to the Declaration, she printed her whole name.
Printed by Mary Kay Goddard in Baltimore, Maryland.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Campaign 2026 is underway and the stakes couldn't be higher.
Every seat in the United States House of Representatives is up for grabs, along with 33 U.S. Senate races.
And the outcome of both could reshape the balance of power in Washington.
Voters will also decide 36 gubernatorial contests.
From the campaign trail to election night, follow campaign 2026 on the C-SPAN networks, C-SPAN, bringing you democracy unfiltered.
C-SPAN's America's Book Club programming is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies that provide C-SPAN as a public service and is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
Now from the Anderson House in Washington, D.C., a conversation with historian and best-selling author Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, whose books span subjects from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, the American West, and the history of the Republican Party.
Her most recent book is the best-selling Democracy Awakening.
Join us now for a stimulating conversation between Heather Cox Richardson and our host, David Rubinstein.
Famous Diners at Anderson House00:02:26
Well, welcome everyone.
We are in Anderson House and with Heather Cox Richardson, and we're going to have a discussion about her books and her writing.
But just to make sure those people who are here know where we're at, this house was built by Lars and Isabel Anderson, completed in 1905.
It was at the time the largest house in Washington other than the White House.
And it was built as a place for entertainment for the Andersons.
They were diplomats professionally, but very, very wealthy.
She was an heiress to the weld shipping fortune.
Upon his death in 1936, shortly thereafter 1938, she gifted this house to the society that is designed to promote the American Revolution.
And it's called the Society of the Cincinnati.
And this was formed after World War, after the Revolutionary War, where people who were generals or senior officers in the war wanted to continue in a fraternal organization.
And actually, George Washington joined the organization.
And at the time, he was a bit skeptical at the time because he didn't want to create a class of citizens that were seen as better than other citizens.
But he did join.
And ultimately, it became an educational institution for the members throughout the country who were descendants of the officers of the war.
It's called the Society of Cincinnati because you may remember from the famous Roman hero Cincinnatus.
He was a fighter.
He put down his plowshares and went to war and then came back and picked up his plowshares and went and became a farmer again.
And the theory was that the American generals and senior officers were the same.
They were basically people who had other professions.
They went to fight the war.
They went back to their professions afterwards.
And so this was designed to honor them.
This house, when it was opened, had very famous people here.
I think William Howard Taft dined here.
Calvin Coolidge dined here.
Winston Churchill dined here.
General John Pershing dined here.
And now it's really a great place to learn about the American Revolution and our Revolutionary War heroes.
And it's perfectly appropriate to have Heather Cox Richardson here because she's an expert on so many of these issues.
So thank you very much for being here.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So let's talk about your background for a moment.
From PhD to Daily Blog00:09:27
You are a person that is a serious scholar, written academic works that are well regarded, but you're also now doing something that most serious academics don't usually do, which is to write more or less a daily blog, if you could call it that, about what's going on in the world and relating it to American history.
Is that right?
That's correct, yes.
And it is on Substack, and it has, I would say, surprised many people that an academic could write something that so many people in the country are dying to read every day.
And how do you actually have time to write something every day about what's going on every day?
Do you write it at the end of the day?
You write it in the beginning of the day.
How does that actually work?
So nobody has time to do what I do.
I do the best I can with it, but I start in bed in the morning.
I wake up and I start checking my phone.
I look at my phone all day, seeing what the news stories are.
I read through the news on social media first, get out of bed, have a cup of coffee, and then I read through major newspapers across the country.
And if there's a story in, say, something about the military, that I go to Stars and Stripes and I go to military.com and I go to the defense industry blogs.
And so I chase down over the course of the day what I think are the main stories for that one day in American history, informed by a historian's eye, because what historians do is rather than looking at breaking news the way a journalist does, we're looking for the levers that move societies.
Historians look at how and why societies change.
So I'm looking for the through lines that show change in society and then about five or six o'clock I start to write, I sit down to write and then I write until it's done.
When did you start doing this?
I did not start doing it.
People started me doing it.
The agency was not mine because people started asking me questions.
I was on Facebook at the time and I had about 20,000 followers.
And I wrote on September 15th, 2019, I wrote about what was happening in the country that day and I got literally thousands of requests for people saying, who was that person?
Why is that happening?
How does that play out?
And I just thought I wouldn't answer the next night because nobody would want to hear from me every night.
So I wrote the 17th of September and I've written every night since, just answering the questions that people have about the country.
I guess you don't get writer's block, right?
I don't get writer's block about the letters.
I could sit down and write right now if you gave me a laptop for today.
But when I try and write a book, it's as if I've never seen a page before.
And how long does it take you to write each day these pieces?
Is it an hour or two hours?
Oh, no.
If I know exactly what I want to say and it's history, so I know it really well, four hours.
Wow.
If it is yesterday, I covered, I'd taken the night off before, so I covered two days of material.
I think I sat down about two o'clock and finished about 12 hours later.
Wow.
So you enjoy this as much as?
Yeah, two hours.
You enjoy this as much as writing the scholarly books and teaching students?
It's different.
Everything I do is teaching.
Everything I do is helping people understand the world around them.
It's just a different medium.
So for a long time, you've been a member of the faculty at Boston College.
And your students, are they as interested in American history as you are?
Well, that's sort of a self-selecting group, right, who come into a classroom of historians.
It was interesting, though, to teach at other universities for people who were not necessarily involved in history.
I started at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.
And that was really interesting because you did have to sell to people why history matters, which you can tell has come through in my writing more recently the stuff I do now, because every day I'm saying to people, why do you care?
Why does this matter?
And that I got from teaching at MIT.
And when I went to a liberal arts college after I left MIT, at one point I was still teaching that way and a hand went up about three weeks into the class and said, Professor, you don't have to sell us on this.
We already like it.
So let me make sure I understand.
So what you're trying to do is write about what the most important events that occurred that day are, but you put it in a context of this is important for history.
When history is written, people will say this is what is significant about what happened today.
That's the idea.
I'm always writing with the eye of somebody who's going to be writing about this period in 150 years, which is one of the reasons I never take a night off, because so many times I've been in the archives reading through a diary and going, oh, I can't wait to hear what he says about Gettysburg or whatever.
And he's like, didn't feel like going out today, you know, planted potatoes or whatever.
And you're like, no.
But what that does is it gives you a really different lens because instead of saying, oh, this is really important because it happens to be in the news this minute, I am more interested in getting the story right for the person who's going to be there in 150 years and in following certain through lines.
Let's talk about your background, how you came to this point.
Where were you born?
I was born outside of Chicago.
And did you grow up in the Chicago area?
We left, we had always spent the summers in Maine where my mother was from, and we left the Chicago area the day after I turned seven and moved to Maine permanently.
And you were always interested in history as a little girl, or when did you pick up your interest in history?
Do you know, I think that when you grow up in a very small town without a lot of access to television and certainly not to movies or to an outside world, what we did is we grew up listening to stories.
So I would not have told you I was interested in history, but everything in my life was surrounded by history.
And where did you go to high school?
Partly in Yarmouth, Maine, and then I went to private school at Exeter.
And what did your parents do?
They ran a hunting and fishing newspaper.
Oh, okay.
Now, your name, Heather Cox Richardson, sounds like a name that's been around for 200 years or so.
It's a very kind of a waspy came over in the Mayflower kind of name.
Did your ancestors come over in the Mayflower?
So yes, some of them did, but there's a little bit of a joke here because my ancestors on that side came before the Mayflower.
They were the fishermen who came over to Maine before those interlopers came in 1600.
I thought those who came on the Mayflower were the Aravists.
That's right, exactly.
All right, so you must have been a pretty good student in high school because you got to Harbor College, right?
And I assume were you valedictorian or something like that?
So the truth is I hated school, passionately hated it.
And maybe that makes me a good teacher now because there's so many other places people could spend their time.
I want to make the time they spend with me valuable.
I loved learning, but I hated doing it on other people's clock.
So I did a lot more than other students did, but not in the same way that the teacher necessarily wanted them to be.
So I was a good student, but I was not the top student by any stretch of the imagination.
All right, but you went to Harvard, I presume you major in history.
My undergrad degree is in history, yes.
Okay, and then you stayed and got a PhD at Harvard as well?
I stayed and got a PhD at Harvard as well.
My master's is in literature, which explains a lot of what I do.
And my PhD is actually not in history.
My PhD is in the history in the program of American civilization, which is turned into American studies after I was there.
It was an attempt to understand what made America tick after World War II and why it had not succumbed to either fascism or to communism.
So we did a lot with ideas, you can tell.
All right, so you have an undergraduate degree, a master's degree, and a PhD from Harvard.
And then when did you find that the job market doesn't welcome Harvard PhDs as much as you thought they might?
I did not, I didn't go to graduate school to go into this profession at all.
I went to graduate school because I loved history by then.
I'd fallen in love with history.
And my advisor wanted me to stay on and work with him, which was an enormous honor.
And I wanted to learn to write, really learn to write.
I had no idea what I'd do after I got a degree.
Well, what did you do after you got your degrees?
Did you stay on it at Harvard?
No, so it was, of course, there were no jobs.
And so I, instead of, there were no jobs, you know, and everyone kept saying, don't worry, it's going to get better soon.
And here we are all these years later.
So I wrote to universities in the area and said, I'm here and I am available for a job if you have one in case somebody needs to be replaced for a maternity leave or whatever.
And I got four offers and I ended up going to MIT and they turned that into a tenure track job for me later.
So I went right into the profession, but not in the normal way.
Okay, so you went to MIT and now for recent years you've been at Boston College?
I went to UMass Amherst in between, MIT, UMass Amherst, and now Boston College.
And now you are living largely in Maine?
That's correct.
And your husband is a lobsterman.
That is correct as well.
So he's here.
And so did you know a lot about lobstering before you married him?
Well, you grow up with it, of course, so I did.
I know a lot about it.
He is also a lobster dealer, which I did not know a lot about, which is essentially sort of being on the stock market every day, except your product is lobster and bait.
Did the South Win00:15:25
Okay, so let's talk about American history and some of the things that you've written about.
You're an expert on many different areas.
Let's start with what we're probably celebrating this year, the 250th, the Revolution, the War.
Now, you've written a piece, the company's, I guess, a video on 10 steps to a revolution, or 10 steps to revolution.
So what was your point you were trying to make, that a revolution doesn't occur overnight.
It takes quite a while.
Revolution took, I think in your writing, about 13 years before you get to a real revolution.
So explain, was there an effort to have a revolution at the beginning of the revolutionary period of time?
And when did the revolution really take hold and said we have to break away from England?
So there's an important distinction between the revolution that the founders made as well as I am making, between the revolution and the revolutionary war.
And what they said was the real revolution was in men's heads, they said men's, but people's heads between 1763, the end of the French and Indian War, and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
So the Journey to Revolution series that you're talking about, 10 Steps to Revolution in Journey to American Democracy, which is a series of videos my team does, takes you through the period where you have the English colonists in the American,
13 American colonies being thrilled to be Englishmen through their sense that they are losing the rights of Englishmen and through their making of a community that were willing to stand for those conservative rights and then ultimately the steps that made them declare their independence in July 4th, 1776.
Some people who've written about the Revolutionary War say the indispensable person was George Washington.
Had he not been the general, we probably would have lost the war and so forth.
Do you agree with that?
So it's a little hard for me to make judgments about the strategy, the military strategy of that war.
I mean, there are certainly doubts about whether or not he should have been fighting in New York and so on.
But in terms of the ideology, the person he was, and his willingness to walk away from power, that was extraordinary.
I always tell my students America has lucked out a number of times.
And the first time it lucked out was with George Washington in that position of extraordinary power and then walking away.
Twice, twice.
Because usually when people won wars as generals, they took over the country, Napoleon being a good example.
And that's the walking away from the army first, and that's just why that's in the rotunda of the Capitol, but then walking away from the presidency is an extraordinary thing.
Now, one of the most celebrated parts of the Revolutionary War is the Declaration of Independence, which was agreed to on July the 4th, 1776, not signed until about August or so.
Why is the Declaration so important?
Wasn't it just a propaganda piece?
Why do we still think it's so important?
Well, of course, they wrote it to justify their rebellion from the king.
You know, why are they not simply rebels?
Why do they have a right to do this?
So that's the context in which they do three remarkable things.
The first of those is to set up those Enlightenment ideals of a country that says that people are created equal, that they have a right to a say in their government, and they have a right to be treated equally before the law.
That's extraordinary.
And then, of course, they list the complaints that they have against the king, which is a way to say the people have a right to check the king, which is a concept that really starts in 1215 with the Magna Carta.
But then they end, I think, with an incredibly poignant call to the idea of the eternal creation of American democracy, in which they say, you know, here we put our hearts on the line.
And we know that by doing this, we have essentially signed our death warrants if, in fact, we fail.
But to make this happen to each other, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
And that vision of continuing to fight for American democracy throughout history, laid out in that document, remains alive even as we sit here.
Now, when I was in grade school, we learned about the American Revolutionary War, and people at the time told me everybody in the colonies wanted to fight and be independent.
But it turns out, I think maybe only a third wanted to be independent, a third wanted to stay where they were, and a third said, I'll be with whoever the winner is.
Is that fair?
Just like life, right?
You know, you see that absolutely everywhere.
I had the great fortune to be in Old North Church on the 200th anniversary, 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride last year.
And that was a really interesting microcosm because they literally can tell from who was in those pews.
It was a third, a third, a third.
And for all the intensity between the people who were patriots and the people who were Tories, I really felt for the people in the middle there who were like, you know, I'm really just trying to put food on the table.
But there came a time when people could no longer look the other way and had to make a choice.
Now, historians don't really like counterfactuals, but they're fun to ask about.
So suppose we had lost the Revolutionary War, what would have happened?
Would we still be part of England or would we be broken away or would we be part of a Commonwealth?
What do you think would have happened?
Well, we don't like counterfactuals.
I will say, though, that in a way you can look forward to the War of 1812 to think of what things would have looked like, because in many ways the War of 1812 was a continuation of the American Revolution.
Because after the Revolution, essentially, the British government basically just pulled back.
It didn't actually leave.
It pulled back to the West and to Canada and waited for Americans to tear themselves apart.
And it was really the War of 1812 that manages to put America on the map as a going concern.
So if you think about what would have happened, you know, you can sort of look at what had happened if we'd lost the War of 1812.
Really, you can see a later kind of Commonwealth arising out of the United States of America, but one that's much more closely tied to the British Commonwealth.
Now, I thought to some extent we won the Revolutionary War because the British business people kind of said, look, this is a loser, costing us too much money.
The colonies that matter are in the Caribbean.
Make sure we don't lose those colonies.
And so they basically put pressure on the British government to kind of get out of this.
Is there any truth to that?
I think that's fair.
I think that's really quite fair.
That's where the real money was, for sure.
So let's talk about some of the books you have written.
Let's talk about the Civil War.
Very few scholars are experts on the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but you're knowledgeable about both.
So on the Civil War, I've always wondered: is there anything Abraham Lincoln could have done to prevent the South from seceding?
By the time Lincoln was in office, they had already seceded.
We'd already lost six states.
So the question there is whether or not there was anything James Buchanan could have done.
And as you know, they considered impeaching him for the fact for a number of reasons, but one of them being that he had said, it's absolutely illegal what the South is doing, but there's nothing I can do about it.
Now, in Lincoln's inaugural address, the first one, he basically supported Buchanan's view that we should have a constitutional amendment, in effect or statute, that would affirm the fact that slavery in the southern states was legal.
Well, he stood on the idea that it was legal according to the Constitution.
What Lincoln really didn't want is for enslavement to spread to the West.
That's what the real fight was about.
It was between the North and South, but it was whether it spread to the West.
Now, one of the things that a number of people point to is Lincoln does say that he is willing to amend the Constitution in 1863, I'm sorry, shortly after 1862 to protect with the 13th Amendment that will protect enslavement until much later on and call for compensated emancipation.
And that he is doing as a reaction to the 1862 elections and saying, okay, you want enslavement to continue.
Here you go.
This is what it's going to look like.
And all these people who had voted for the Democrats in 1962 were like, no, that's not what we wanted.
And so that's when you get the real push coming to behind the Emancipation Proclamations sticking on the country.
Now, the North had a population of roughly three times the South.
It was wealthier, more industrialized.
Why did it take four years to win the war?
Originally, in the First Battle of Bull Run, people went out there as kind of a carnival to watch the Southern soldiers get slaughtered, which turned out wasn't the case.
They actually won the first battle.
Why did it take so long for the Civil War to end?
Well, so when you talk about the wealth of the North during the Civil War, you're really talking about the wealth of the North coming to play after 1862.
And I always tell my students, if you're in jeopardy and they give you a battle and say who won, you have to ask the date because if it's 61 or 62, you can guess the South's going to win.
63, 64, you can guess the North's going to win.
And part of that is just the North takes a while to get its industrial base going.
You know, you're not going to get national money until 1862.
You're not going to get the railroads going down in a big way until the war.
There's a lot of pieces that had to come into play.
And you know, one of the things, and this is a little bit of a stretch, but one of the things that I think is fascinating is having watched Ukraine and how Ukraine was really up against the ropes in the early days of its war against Russia, but it managed to develop this industrial economy that is really now leading the technology of war with its drones.
And it always, in some ways, makes me think of how the Union was able to pull together its industrial base in a way that it couldn't in the first couple of years.
Now, Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I think, in January 1 of 1863.
That's the final, the preliminary.
The final one, the preliminary in September of 1762.
He issued the final one.
And why did he wait so long to do it?
And he was not what you would call an abolitionist.
Is that correct?
Personally, he did not want to see the continuation of enslavement, but he was a constitutional lawyer and he believed it was in the Constitution.
So that's the answer to your question.
He felt that he couldn't end enslavement except under the war powers.
So what he does is he issues the preliminary emancipation coming in.
He actually writes it in the summer of 62 because the Union is losing so badly on the battlefields.
And one of the arguments that's developing, especially in the American newspapers, is that the reason the South is doing as well as it is is because they are able to mobilize their black population, their enslaved population, to do the work that the white guys won't do, so they're able to fight.
So when Lincoln writes the preliminary emancipation, he does it only under the war powers and says, I'm going to take these war materials in the form of enslaved people away from you.
And that's why the Emancipation Proclamation has, as one historian said, all the grandeur of a bill of lading, because it's a very technical document saying, I'm only freeing the people who are under control of the Confederates because that's the war powers.
And then he goes on afterward and says, this is why we must amend the Constitution, because once the war is over, I'm not sure the war powers are going to stick for this particular issue.
Now, Lee, General Lee, who was asked to be the head of the Union Army but turned that down, he ultimately goes to Gettysburg and thinks he can have a decisive victory, perhaps against the North, therefore bringing the North to the negotiating table.
Had Gettysburg turned out differently, do you think the Civil War would have ended in favor of the South?
Again, I don't do counterfactuals, but I will tell you in summer of 64, Lincoln thought he was going to lose.
Lincoln had all members of his cabinet sign a document saying they would cooperate with the next president, whomever that might be.
And there were a lot of things that had to come together.
Remember, the slaughter was incredible, and there were a lot of things that had to come together for Lincoln to win in 64, and he did not think it was going to happen.
So obviously he did win in 1964, and then ultimately the war is over and the North wins.
Lincoln is assassinated, but he has a plan for Reconstruction that was one that maybe would have been better than the plan as it was implemented under his successor, Andrew Johnson.
Had Lincoln lived, do you think that Reconstruction would have worked better?
Oh, yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Because a couple of things right off the bat.
Lincoln would not have Congress.
Remember, Johnson was not a Republican.
Johnson was a Democrat.
And in fact, technically, the Republican Party didn't run in 1964.
It was actually the Union Party that ran in 64.
That's why he was brought onto the ticket.
And he would have been able to work with Congress.
He actually didn't like the Republicans, so he was not able to work with them.
And the other thing that would have happened was Lincoln would have called Congress back into session in the summer of 65, as Lincoln did not.
The Congress had adjourned on the day of Lincoln's second inaugural.
They had worked all night.
They went to the inaugural, and then they went home.
So they weren't there when Lincoln was assassinated.
And they came rushing back to Washington.
And Johnson was like, no, thanks, I've got this.
And they don't reconvene until December, December 5th, I believe it is, of 65.
So he had that whole summer.
And what did he do in that whole summer?
He pardoned all but about 1,500 of the Confederate leaders, bringing them back into the body politic as if they had never left.
And what that did for the Union and for the United States was that, remember, this is 65.
We're going to have a new census in 70.
And the new census in 1870 is going to count African Americans as full people rather than as three-fifths of a person, giving those Confederate leaders more power in Congress than they had had before the Civil War.
That was all set up by Johnson because he was a Democrat and he was interested in running the new Democratic Party.
Pardoning 1,500 people at once?
Everybody but 1,500.
He did everybody else.
And of course, the Congress is able to change the rule for the peons, but not for those leaders because they had personal presidential parties.
I don't like counterfactuals, but suppose your fellow Maine citizen Hannibal Hamlin had remained vice president in the second term.
You think history would have been different?
I do, yes.
Because he was more moderate on those issues?
Well, he was a Republican, and he would not, I mean, one of the things that is astonishing about the end of the Civil War in the United States is the welcoming back into the body politic of the very same people who had tried to destroy the country.
Now, you've written another book on the South, and your argument is in that book that the South actually won the Civil War to some extent because really the people that were in control of the South before the Civil War more or less came back and were in control of it.
Is that essentially your argument?
No, it's a little bit different than that because what I'm arguing in that book, that's how the South won the Civil War, I'm arguing about the ideology of the Confederacy.
And part of the argument of that book is that because there was never any penalty for having adhered to the South, treason was never made odious, those ideologies moved into the American West for a number of reasons in that period.
And because they moved into the American West, the Western states began to work with the Southern states ideologically and continued to affect American politics to the present.
Now, you wrote a book as well on the Reconstruction.
And your view on Reconstruction is that it was well-intentioned by Lincoln, but as implemented by Johnson, it fell apart and basically didn't really work at all.
Reinventing Society Today00:15:45
No, no.
What I really talked about in that book, that was The Death of Reconstruction, was that, you know, it's not really a surprise that white Southerners were not terribly interested in equality for black Americans.
But the real question was, why did the North give it up?
And that book argued that the North equated issues of labor and race by about 1871 when the Confederates began to talk about labor rather than race.
And so the North gives up on Reconstruction because of class issues.
And it really argued for looking at American history in that period as sort of the marriage of race and class, a problem we still deal with today.
As the country was expanding west, your point was that the principles of southern landowners was more dominant in the western part of the country than maybe the principles of northerners.
That's correct, yes, for a number of reasons.
So you also wrote a book on wounded knee.
And for those who aren't familiar with wounded knee, can you explain what wounded knee was?
So I talked about the wounded knee massacre of 1890, not the later wounded knee events in the 20th century.
And that book was really an attempt to integrate Indigenous history into larger American political history and to say, you know, we really have to look at these things as all one history, not as, you know, sort of pieces of history that only affect certain people.
But your point is that Wounded Knee wasn't an isolated incident.
It was basically emblematic of what was going on out west in the United States trying to expand West.
Well, no, it was more that what happens in Wounded Knee is a direct result of an attempt of the Republicans to retain control of the Senate.
It's actually really interesting.
You know, that's when the tariff is in real trouble in the 1890s because so many of the American people recognize that it's hurting them because they're paying for the tariffs.
And so they elect Grover Cleveland first in 84 to get rid of the tariffs.
And then in 1888, there's a real push to put Benjamin Harrison in office in order to protect those tariffs.
And then after the election of 1890, there's this huge change in the control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
And the Republicans hold, they don't expect to lose the House and they don't expect to lose the Senate.
And it turns out they hold the Senate by only one single vote.
And that single vote is in South Dakota.
And the attempt to hold that seat meant a number of things, including the attempt to rush the military into South Dakota.
And then, you know, just people make human mistakes that lead to a massacre.
Nobody wanted that massacre, but that didn't help the people who were in the middle of it.
Now, your most recent book is about awakening democracy.
Now, can you explain what your point is in that book?
It's about how democracy, as I understand it, is the challenge we have in today's democracy really have antecedents throughout our history.
Is that right?
Yes, and you know, a lot of people asked what that book was about because it's got a really odd organization or so they say.
And I began that book to explain the things that people had asked me about.
You know, what is a conservative?
What is a liberal?
You know, when did the parties switch sides?
And what I realized when I was writing it was that the question people ask me most is what on earth has happened?
Where are we?
And how do we get out of here?
And that is why the book is organized in three parts.
It says, here's the trajectory to where we have been that led us to the place where our democracy is under threat.
And then the final third of it is the pieces in our history, beginning with colonial America, leading up through the revolution and so on, where Americans have managed to defend democracy even at times when they felt that it would slip away from them.
Now, do you think democracy today is under greater challenge in our country than in previous eras in our country?
Yes.
Because of a long period in which we have concentrated power in a single executive.
And as we have done that, we have also eroded the checks and the other checks and balances that we have had to protect us against that.
And that is, we're in a different place now than we have been in, say, the Civil War, because we, in fact, have a Congress that does not seem to be interested in protecting its prerogatives and a Supreme Court that is actively working to concentrate power in a single person.
Now, after World War II, a Council of Economic Advisors was set up in the White House to give presidents economic advice.
Graham Allison, a former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, has suggested they have a council of historical advisors or historians so they could give presidents and their senior leaders some sense of history.
What do you think about that idea?
Well, I'd like to see everybody reading more history anyway without a council of advisors to have them do it.
And I will say, we have had presidents in the past who were extraordinarily well-read in history.
I mean, Dwight Eisenhower just jumps to the fore on that one, but there are plenty, Lincoln, of course, and I shouldn't leave out people like FDR, but it would be hard, I think, to put together a council of historians because by definition, we disagree with each other.
So as you look back on American history, what do you think it is that enabled this group of 13 colonies to go from being a small group of 3 million people, half a million slaves, to be the most powerful country in the world by far over such a long period of time?
Was it a commitment to democracy?
Was it all the land we had, immigration?
What would you say is the things that are most responsible for our becoming what we became?
Well, I would say yes to all of those things, but I will say what has made America different, I think, is our ideas.
The idea that you were welcome here if you were willing to be part of this society and work hard and contribute to the community.
And that has meant that we continually renewed ourselves.
It's one of the fascinating that when Ronald Reagan was leaving office, he made it a point that his final speech basically said what I just said, that in fact we are constantly reinventing ourselves.
And we are constantly, I think, drawing from our Puritan ancestors to critique where we have been and what we are doing.
So we're one of the few countries that constantly complains about how we're not living up to what we should be doing.
We're not living up to expectations.
And that ability to recreate ourselves every day, every moment, has made us able to embody the principles of our founders and to live things that people like Thomas Paine called for.
We have the ability to begin the world anew.
That's Thomas Paine in common sense in January of 1776.
And that ability to continue to make the world anew is what has made us different and able, I think, always to grow and change.
Well, we've been pretty successful for roughly 250 years.
We've had our problems, Civil War and other things.
Are you optimistic about the next 50 years or so?
Yes.
And because you think the ingredients that made us so successful will continue, more or less?
Because I believe in the American people.
I believe in the ideas of continually reinventing a society.
But also because I believe that American democracy, with its principles and the Enlightenment, speaks to the human call for self-determination, that people want to be able to choose their own fate.
And I don't believe that Americans now, any more than they had in any time before now, will choose to give that up, will choose to walk away from the idea of being able to have control over their own destinies.
So when people say how concerned they are about where we are today, and I am very concerned about it, I look at all the times in our history when people said we can't possibly make it out of this moment.
And Americans rose to the challenge because they wanted to continue to be able to determine their own fate, and I think we will do it again.
So if somebody said to you, who are the three, four, five most important figures in American history that enabled us to get from a small group of 13 colonies to where we are today, who would you cite?
Well, I would probably start with Samuel Adams or Thomas Paine, because what they did is they created communities through social media channels at the time writing letters.
I would say somebody like Abraham Lincoln, of course, who insisted that we must stand firm to those principles and make sure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people did not vanish from this earth.
I would certainly point to Frances Perkins, who took the idea of a community and made it central to our government with the 1935 Social Security Act.
She, of course, was the Secretary of Labor under FDR.
How many do I have?
Well, you can have more, but let me ask you: if you could have dinner with any one American who's lived at any time in our country's history, who would you like to have dinner with and what would you like to ask that person if you have one or two questions you could ask anybody?
So do they have to be honest with me?
Well, up to you.
Because I got to, if they're going to be honest with me, because of course there are many people that'd be fascinating to talk to, but they would look at a woman and say, what's the point, right?
But if they would be honest with me, Booker T. Washington.
Why is that?
Because he was brilliant and because he had to walk between two worlds.
And walking between two worlds when one of those worlds wanted to kill you meant that every day, every step he made, everything he said had to be carefully thought through in order to achieve the goals that he wanted.
And I respect that he was doing what he did under those circumstances.
And I would absolutely love to know how his mind worked and how he saw himself, what he saw his role as in American society.
All right.
Well, suppose I said you could have dinner with any woman whoever was prominent in American history.
Who's the woman you would like to have dinner with?
Well, I'd go for the artists and the writers, to be honest, just for my personal interest.
But I'm going to go with Frances Perkins on that one because Frances Perkins and what she did with the Social Security Act of 1935 really, I think, changed the entire nature of the American government from focusing on the property rights that were emphasized so strongly by the founders because of their heritage from especially the Magna Carta.
She turned the United States into a government that focused on the equality of everybody in a community.
And that shift was extraordinary.
It was a profound shift.
And she did it in part by doing what Booker T. Washington did, by playing a certain kind of a role to change the world.
And that would be fascinating.
Now, when you write your history books, how long does it typically take you to do the research and the writing?
The writing could be as little.
I wrote How the South Won in three months.
But the thinking takes years.
The book that I'm writing now, I've been actively thinking about it for at least two years.
Modern politics.
I'm taking a new look at modern politics.
Now, as a great historian, do you write with a feather and a quill kind of thing, or do you use a computer?
I wish.
I like writing by hand more than anything, but I had an accident a number of years ago and don't have much of the use of my right hand to hold a pen.
So I have to do everything on a laptop.
Right.
So do you have children who say I want to be a historian as well?
I have failed all of my children.
They have all become engineers.
Engineers?
You wanted them to go into private equity or something important like that?
Yeah.
One is actually in New York doing things like that, yes.
Okay.
So today, history students, when you're talking to students, are they as interested in American history as you would like them to be?
And why do you think so many students today are not majoring in history?
When I was in college, about 8 or 9% of undergraduates were history majors today.
It's maybe 1 or 2 percent.
Why do you think that is?
Well, I think it's a mistake that they are not.
And I will say that students, and I think Americans in general, are more interested in history than they have been for a very long time.
The fact that an academic historian is sitting on the stage with you says something.
You know, this would not have happened 20 years ago.
But I think people have made the mistake of thinking that education is about a profession.
Because what education really is about is teaching you to pivot to whatever comes at you.
And as we know now, that most people, when they graduate college today, will probably have more than 12 jobs in their future, most of which haven't been invented yet.
And the last thing you should do in college is to decide you're going to train for a job that's here today, because for all we know, it won't be here in five years.
And what you need to learn is how to think, not how to do a certain profession.
Now, you are a well-known academic historian and qualified to teach at any college in the United States in American history.
But you weren't probably a rock star when you were writing these academic books.
Now you're more or less a rock star in American history because your publication is just so well known.
So how do you deal with the fame?
Can people come up to you all the time and now they want to hear your views on this or that or they want your autographs, your selfies?
How do you deal with all that?
First of all, a rock star historian is like a jumbo shrimp.
I mean, it's absolutely an oxymoron.
But for me, my world has not changed at all.
I still talk to people through a laptop.
And I used to do it for just six people.
Now I do it for many millions of people, but I'm still absolutely me.
When you write your piece, you no doubt get responses.
How do you deal with all the responses?
You can't have the time to respond to everybody.
So how do you deal with all that?
Because I guess you get thousands of responses all the time on what you write.
I can't even read my email, let alone answer my email.
I do try and read a few of the first comments that come through on the, I post in a number of places, but I just, I can't do everything.
I have to let a lot of that go.
It's sad.
I do try and respond to people, but I just can't.
So if a president of the United States who you were politically simpatico with said, I want a historian to work in the White House with me, and some presidents have had historians.
Arthur Schlesinger worked in the White House for President Kennedy.
Would you ever consider going to government service and bringing your historian's perspective to a president that you liked?
Dude, I'm in government service right now, and the answer to that is probably no, because there are two ways to think about what a historian does.
And one was Schlesinger, who was very open about the fact he thought his job was to encourage people to embrace the policies of somebody like President Kennedy.
But then at the same time, there was a historian named John Hope Franklin, who was also deeply involved in the civil rights movement.
And he said that the time that a historian becomes wedded to a political party is the time when they cease to be trustworthy.
And that his role was more to look at the nation in general and talk about that and what importance those issues had for people at large.
And my model has always been John Hope Franklin.
Well, he was a distinguished historian at University of Chicago and at Duke University, and I guess one of the leading African American historians in our country's history, for sure.
Trusting Historians Beyond Parties00:03:01
Let me ask you, let's go back over the last, let's say, 50 years.
What do you think are the most significant things that happened in American history in the last 50 years?
Is it civil rights, equal rights, wars we fought?
What do you think are the epic parts of our history that people 100 years from now will look back and say, during this 50-year period of time, these are the most significant things that happened?
Let's take it from, we're now in 2026, let's say back to 1975, last 50 years or so.
If you give me a few more years than that, I would say easily accessible birth control, because it enabled women to have control over their careers.
I would say, if you're looking big picture, health, the fact that people live longer lives now makes a huge difference.
I mean, one of the reasons we have a problem with the Supreme Court and there's such fighting over the Supreme Court is, you know, when the framers put together the idea of a Supreme Court, they had to ride the horses themselves.
They weren't going to be riding that circuit when they were in their 90s.
It was a young man's job.
Same with Congress.
So I would say health care as well.
Transportation, another big change.
I think if you're looking for something more politically oriented, what would I look at for that in the United States?
I would pick something small.
I mean, because I'm going toward Vietnam.
I would pick something like the U2 affair. under Eisenhower because it was the first time a president was caught lying to the American people and that changed our relationship with the presidency.
I mean, we could do this all day.
The first time a president was lying to the American people caught because he was caught on film.
And that was a huge deal.
People have forgotten it now, but of course the erosion of faith in the presidency, which really takes off under Nixon and during Vietnam.
U2, the U2 affair was a big part of that.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a sentence that Walter Isaacson has said is the greatest sentence ever written.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator, we're certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
How could he have written that when he was a slave owner?
Oh, I think he couldn't have written it unless he was a slave owner, which sounds weird, but that's the very contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans.
When those men looked out at their fields full of enslaved people and said, we are all created equal, they were writing out of we all the people that didn't look like them, didn't sound like them, didn't have the same kind of money they did.
And by getting rid of the vast majority of humanity, women, people of color, black Americans, and so on, they could say, oh yeah, we're all created equal.
But the genius of our age from their declaration of that to the present and I hope beyond is recognizing that those principles, even though they had limits on them, don't have to have limits on them for us.
Contradictions of American History00:11:04
And that's exactly what happened as soon as the Declaration comes out.
You have people like Phyllis Wheatley, the black poet from Boston, writing to an Indigenous preacher saying, those are great principles and we feel the same way.
And that's what we've been doing ever since.
That's what America is, is people who weren't included saying, hey, we should be in that too, and expanding the boundaries of that extraordinary sentence.
So if somebody is watching and says, I want to be like Heather Cox Richardson, I want to be a great historian.
I want to go to college, study American history, write about American history, what would you recommend?
And what is the skill set that is required to kind of be a professional historian?
Read, read, read.
Write, write, write, and always ask questions.
Because at the end of the day, I do have the skill of doing research.
That's actually my big skill.
I'm really good at washing windows.
I'm really good at research.
And you learn to write.
But at the end of the day, this magic sauce I bring to anything is I am never afraid to ask a question.
So many people never learn about their world because they won't ask a question about it.
Always ask questions.
And every time you do that, you're going to find other people want to know the same thing.
And there's always an answer.
Leaving your books aside, let's suppose a young person or a middle-aged person says, I want to learn more about American history.
What are one or two or three books that you would recommend as introductory books that people can learn more about American history if they were to read them?
Introductory books.
Well, I'm going to go in a funny place for that.
I'm going to go in a couple of funny places.
The first place I'm going to go is to children's books.
There are a number of very good, comprehensive histories of the United States that are written for fifth graders.
And that's always a good place to start because you get through a lot of material quickly.
I always talk about the light-bright theory of history.
I don't know about you all, but I was in college and took an entire course on the French Revolution and knew everything there was to know about the French Revolution.
We read 13 books on it, but nobody ever told me it came after the American Revolution.
And that was news to me when I was in graduate school that would have been really helpful in understanding the French Revolution.
So I do the lightbright theory.
You need to know a shallow amount about a lot of stuff to see where the pieces fit, and then you can dive in.
So I would start there, and then I have a number of favorite books that are on specialized issues, but that tell a much larger story.
And so, you know, one of my favorites is Murdering McKinley by Eric Roushway out there in California.
It's about murdering McKinley, but it's not really about murdering McKinley.
It's about the whole late 19th century.
And it was such a favorite of mine that I based, he based his book on Citizen Kane.
I based my book, Wounded Knee, on murdering McKinley.
So I like those.
Rather than going into one deep dive, for me anyway, I like the big, broad pictures.
Now, you're writing history all the time for your pieces on your American newsletter.
It's called American Experience.
No, the newsletter is Letters from an American.
Okay, Letters from American.
And you write books, but when you're just letting your hair down, what do you actually like to do other than history?
Are you an exerciser?
You scoff?
You know, what is it that you like to do for relaxation other than history?
Kayak, bake, kayak.
Knit.
Yep, big kayaker, knit, and bake.
In that order?
No, not necessarily.
I mean, when my kids left, I had to cut back on the baking because my husband finally put his foot down and said, you know, I'm going to look like Job of the Hutt over here if you don't slow down.
But yeah, those are my things.
When you're kayaking, does anybody say there's Heather Cox Richardson kayaking going on?
Well, there's nobody else out there.
I live in the middle of nowhere.
But all of those things, especially the kayaking, are, and I walk a lot too, they're a way sort of to think things through.
And I love repetitive exercise.
And knitting's the same way.
You can knit and knit and knit, and your brain goes somewhere else and you can think.
Now, did your parents live to see your considerable success?
No.
They died when I was young.
And do you have siblings?
I do.
And did they tell you you weren't this great when you were little or they don't?
Do you know we all have had really quite successful careers?
I don't think I would put any one of us above any of the others.
And because we lost our parents so young, we're still quite close.
So final question.
What are you most proud of what you've accomplished with your life so far?
Is it getting people interested in history?
It's the books, the teaching.
What are you most proud of having accomplished?
Do you know, I don't think a lot about what I've accomplished.
I always think about what's out in front.
I think I like that I'm making people feel like they have agency over American democracy again, but it's a funny thing for a historian.
I tend not to look back.
And it sounds like I'm trying to get away from that question, and I'm really not.
I'm more interested in what comes next.
So as a historian, somebody cares about democracy, have you ever failed to vote or you always vote?
I failed once to vote.
Really?
Yes.
And did something bad happen as a result of your not voting that one time?
It was the election of 1980.
And I realized that my vote mattered, and I have voted ever since.
Okay, well, thank you for voting ever since.
And thank you for being a great historian.
And thank you for being here today.
And thank you for this conversation.
It's been a pleasure.
Bye.
Thank you.
Before the interview, Heather Cox Richardson and David Rubenstein viewed artifacts from the archive of the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati.
What a pleasure.
Great to meet you.
My name is Thomas Leiler.
Nice to meet you.
Okay.
Nice to see you.
How are you?
And so this document right here, what's called a broadside.
So this would have been put up in the streets of London.
There's only one other copy of this.
It's in the National Archives.
This is the only copy in American libraries.
It's dated 1773.
And what's interesting about it is it's one of the only known recruitment posters for the British Navy.
And they're seeking to recruit people in 1773.
And 1773 is still early in the Revolution.
But why we could connect this to taxation is the Gatsby affair off of Rhode Island has occurred prior to this.
The colonists feared that those who potentially were suspects for the burning of the ship would be extradited or taken to England where they wouldn't receive a fair trial.
So the Gatsby affair connects to the sort of the revolution.
And this is really fun because these broadsides are incredibly rare.
This is beautiful.
And so this is a revolutionary era broadside.
This is really beautiful.
My people were all mariners in what was then Massachusetts, but they're probably saying we're not doing that.
Right, and they had, yeah, Abraham Whipple had burnt the ship.
This is an orderly book maintained in 1783.
So we're moving ahead here.
The other one was 1778.
So this is at the conclusion of the Revolution.
And this is near Newburgh, New York, right?
The cantonment, or basically where the officers were...
The revolution was over because largely Yorktown had defined the terms of the British capitulation.
But the soldiers weren't ready to go home.
So they were, you know, and the officers in particular were nervous about what would be next.
Would they receive pay?
Would they be called back?
What were they going home to?
Who was actually in charge of their, you know, North Carolina?
Should they return to North Carolina?
Would the Continental Congress actually have authority over that land that they haven't seen possibly for five years if they've been in the service in the Revolution?
So there's a lot of, and you know this, right?
And so this is when you start to have what's called the Newburgh Conspiracy.
And the Newburgh Conspiracy is a group is recorded in this orderly book by Ebenezer Smith, a Massachusetts gentleman, who would record the speeches in the sort of behind-the-scenes speeches.
Not only this is Washington's speech recorded by an officer, but also other people's speeches that were happening for and against this conspiracy, which potentially was going to replace George Washington with another officer as the sort of commander-in-chief.
So one of the great strategies of Henry Knox was to create Massachusetts was to devise the Society of the Cincinnati.
And he did so through drafting a constitution, essentially, which is called the Institution of the Society of the Cincinnati.
This is an original parchment copy of the institution that would have been written by Henry Knox and also Jedediah Huntington informed it.
There's a drafting committee to writing this, and it's really important to see it as potentially, I mean, you could come back to me on this, but to see it as a stepping stone for the Constitution.
Because here you see men coming from different colonies with different backgrounds agreeing that they could all sign a document and in so doing, form a sort of way of working together, collaborating, that this creates the model for potentially the Constitution down the road.
See more with Heather Cox Richardson and the American Revolution Institute's artifacts.
And watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, May 17th, with our guest, historian Candace Millard.
She's the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic, winner of several awards, including the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book, and adapted into an award-winning Netflix series.
Hero of the Empire, named Amazon's number one history book of 2016, and River of the Gods.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
A Kid's Library Discovery00:00:51
If you wouldn't mind, I'll tell a quick story about kind of how I became a writer.
So we had this wonderful library there we could walk to.
And one day I walked in and there was this vertical revolving rack of books and they were adult books.
And again, I'm this kid from this little town in Ohio.
But there was one book that really, I loved the cover, I loved the title, and it was called I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings.
As I was walking home, I started to read it and I understood for the first time what literature was because this book transported me and it was so beautiful and so powerful and so unlike anything I had ever experienced.