Overview
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
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
