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Heather Cox Richardson

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    10/6/2020

    The Oligarchs’ Revenge (Review)

    by Manisha Sinha

    Heather Cox Richardson's book makes an essential argument that the conceptual distinction between class and race in American history obscures the way that American elites have worked to create and defend oligarchy. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    6/29/2020

    The Western Origins of the “Southern Strategy”

    by Bruce Bartlett

    The growing importance of racially conservative white Republicans in the western states after World War II helped present southern whites with a viable alternative to the Democratic Party. 

  • SOURCE: Letters from an American
    2/23/20

    Has America Ever Been in Such a Crisis Before? Yes, Three Times

    by Heather Cox Richardson

    A lot of folks have been asking me lately if America has ever been in such a crisis before and, if so, what people in the past did to save democracy. The answer to the first question is yes, it has, three times.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    9/19/19

    When Adding New States Helped the Republicans

    by Heather Cox Richardson

    Putting new stars on the U.S. flag has always been political. But D.C. statehood is a modest partisan ploy compared with the mass admission of underpopulated western territories—which boosts the GOP even 130 years later.

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg News
    4-4-13

    Heather Cox Richardson: How Republicans Once Championed the Federal Income Tax

    Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and the president of the Historical Society. The opinions expressed are her ownThe government has the right to “demand” 99 percent of a man’s property when the nation needs it.That was the argument made by a Republican congressman in 1862 to introduce a novel idea: the federal income tax.The Civil War was then costing the Treasury $2 million a day. To pay for uniforms, guns, food, mules, wagons, bounties and burials, Congress had issued hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds and paper money. But Republicans had a horror of debt and the runaway inflation that paper currency usually caused.Taxes were the obvious answer. A conservative Republican newspaper declared: “There is not the slightest objection raised in any loyal quarter to as much taxation as may be necessary.”...