I said I was going to try to write more often, even if I did not have anything profound to say. Well, how’s that going?
I am not sure I have shared anything profound so far. So why worry about writing more often? It is the fault of people like Heather Cox Richardson. It’s not really her fault that I don’t write more often but I admit to feeling a twinge of misplaced envy that she writes every day, good stuff every day. Here’s a link to her blog, Letter from an American. It is $60 per year, for a post nearly every day, sent to your email address. But, if you just go to her site, you can read everything for free.
I heard Richardson interviewed on a podcast called The Road to Now while I was out walking one night (before I hurt my knee, I guess) and the same day – or what seemed like the same day – I read about her blog. (I honestly thought I had stumbled across something. Ha. Me and 350,000 other subscribers.) She is a 19th American history professor at Boston College; I think most of her research has been about the Civil War. She started writing the blog at the beginning of the pandemic, but given the themes she deals with, I think she could have been writing since 2016. (I have not read her first post yet. I am still working my way back through her archived posts. Maybe she explains her motivation in that first post.) She selects something from the day’s events that she thinks is important to consider and then puts it into historical context.
The posts are not long, usually – maybe 3,000 words. But you can tell that she is putting enough work into them to make them cogent, stand-alone pieces of critical observations without doing so much editing and reworking that she cannot get it done for the next day’s deadline. Sometimes I save up a few to be able to read altogether on one day, just because I like reading her pieces for longer than a few minutes.
Although I think every day’s piece is worthwhile, I think her writing around the January 6th insurrection was especially powerful. She helps place the insurrectionists in history, alongside the White supremacists from the 19th and 20th centuries whom they revere. She is critical of people in the Republican party but I do not think she has been especially generous to the Democrats, either. It is just that the Republicans, some of them anyway, have been so outrageously un-American, anti-democratic, she has to focus her lens on them first. [Note: I just looked up her books to put at the bottom and her most recent book is, it appears, an intellectual history of the Republican party.] What I appreciate is how often she explains, in various ways, the evolution of thought which brought the Republican Party to this moment. From what it was under Lincoln, to Wilson, to Eisenhower, to Reagan. In fact, it is the Reagan-era history that I find most useful: I was alive and near voting age but not really aware of, or informed about, the intellectual underpinnings of the politics of the time.
In any case, here’s my post for the day. It is not nearly so substantive as Richardson’s; today, she writes about the right wing fanatics who have lost the ability to distinguish between the truth and what they manufacture. Actually, they have not lost anything – they are choosing to reject facts and objective truth.
Final useful addition for the day. I have Richardson’s books on my list at the library. I am listing them here, in case you want to look them up. 🙂
- To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014)
- Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)
- “Richardson’s Rules of Order,” at: http://histsociety.blogspot.com/search/label/Richardson%27s%20Rules%20of%20Order
- West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
- “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (2006)
- The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001)
- The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War(1997)
P.S. I just found a New York Times article about her! Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.