Subtitled “Notes on the State of America”
(Viking, Sep 2023, xvii + 286pp, including 30p of notes and index)
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become well-known, in addition to several earlier books, for her newsletter called Letters from an American, now on Substack. I don’t recall how I first heard of her, probably on Facebook, her Wikipedia entry suggests. (That entry notes that her newsletter is the most successful on Substack, bringing in $1 million/year. She’s the most prominent in a trend of influential thinkers to abandoned traditional media for independent subscription-based platforms, even though most of their content is free. Paul Krugman being the latest.)
This book takes a century-long view of America, explaining how we got to the point where someone like Trump could be elected president. It was published in 2019, and of course she continues to narrate history as it unfolds in her daily posts. Her style is straightforward and equanimous, matter-of-fact in describing the situation without seeming overly partisan. I started this book when it came out in late 2023, put it aside for some reason, and finished reading it last August. And now am finally writing it up here.
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