Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:01]
Heather Cox Richardson
I define patriotism as Americans retaking their agency to protect democracy. And when I say democracy, here's what I'm the right to be treated equally before the law. Everybody, everybody. Rich, poor, undocumented, the people in Delaney hall to Donald Trump.
- [00:21]
Al Letson
Coming up on More to the story, Historian and wildly popular social media star Heather Cox Richardson on recognizing the mistakes of our country's past in order to focus on on our nation's future. Stay with us.
- [00:42]
Heather Cox Richardson
Every day, doctors use medical devices to monitor a patient's health. But what if the device is flawed and gives the wrong vital sign reading because of the color of someone's skin? Everyone needs to be warned, every hospital emergency department, because relying on this device is killing people. To hear all episodes of the Race Equation from the New England Journal of Medicine. Subscribe to Intention to Treat this show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo-o o.com that's o d o o.com
- [01:38]
Jane Butcher
want to make a lasting difference to Reveal and protect independent journalism? Right now, it won't cost you a thing. Hi, it's Jane Butcher from Boulder, Colorado. I've spent my life fighting for justice, which is why I'm a longtime supporter of Reveal and the center for Investigative Reporting. I'm stepping up to protect the future of fearless independent journalism, and you can, too, by joining CIR's Legacy Challenge. Just let Reveal know you're going to include them in your legacy plans. Provide some basic information, and here's the really exciting part. A generous donor will contribute up to $10,000 now to fund Reveal's essential reporting in honor of your gift. Your legacy gift of any size makes an impact not just in the future, but right now. If you'd like to join me or want to learn more, please reach out to giftsevealnews.org again, that's giftsevielnews.org the Legacy Challenge is only available for a limited time. Stand up for the truth today.
- [02:58]
Al Letson
This is more to the story. I'm Al letson. Back in 2020, during the height of COVID and on the heels of a bitter presidential campaign, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American became the most popular newsletter on Substack. It's a no nonsense mix of politics and history, and her fans cannot get enough. Today, with over 2 million subscribers, the prolific writer, who has also written seven books, has grown her media empire to include videos and podcasts. In a time where legacy media organizations are selling out or under attack, many are turning to Dr. Cox Richardson for a daily affirmation, or at least an explanation. Heather, how you doing today?
- [03:45]
Heather Cox Richardson
I'm good, how are you? It's such a pleasure to be here.
- [03:47]
Al Letson
It is a pleasure to be here with you, too. I just. I remember there was a time when the world just seemed to be crazy, which I still feel we're in. And then at some point along the way, I heard your voice and started thinking, oh, somebody is talking sanity here. So thank you very much for giving me a little bit of foundation to feel like there's actually sanity in the world.
- [04:11]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, I'm glad to hear that. And I think that's basically what I do, is I try and untangle all the stuff happening around us so that it's possible for people to get their minds around it, to understand what's happening, and crucially then to think of ways to push back against the things they don't. Like.
- [04:29]
Al Letson
Yeah. Tell me, how did you get started doing this type of work? And when I say this type of work, I mean, how did you get started being a force in social media and your newsletter and all of that? Like, how did it start?
- [04:43]
Heather Cox Richardson
Actually, I think this is really interesting because it wasn't me. It was really. I did not wake up one day and say, here's a great idea, I'm gonna start a newsletter that's gonna take over my life or anything like that. I'm a teacher, I'm a college professor and a writer, and I love to explore ideas and the way they intersect with the reality of American life. That's really my sweet spot, is the relationship between or images and reality. That's always fascinated me from the time I first started reading, basically. And so the way I actually got involved in public facing to the degree I am now, although I was always interested in public facing work, was that in 2019, when I'd been following the news, but not as closely, obviously, as I do now. And in 2019, I had been writing on Facebook about once a week for about 20,000 readers, 22,000 readers, and, you know, sort of writing essays about what the world looked like to me or about growing up or, you know, sort of general essays. And I hadn't Written since July of 2019 because I was moving and a lot was going on and I was writing a book and I just hadn't had time to write on Facebook. And on June, I'm sorry, September 15th, I got stung by a yellow jacket and I'm allergic to yellow jackets, and I did not have my EpiPen. So rather than going back to Boston from my home in Maine where I was stung, I sat down to sort of see how bad the reaction was going to be. And I thought, well, as long as I'm sitting here swelling, I might as well write on Facebook for all the people who've been wondering where I've gone. And I sat down. And that was just after the then acting chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California, had written a letter to acting Director of National Intelligence saying, we know you're withholding a whistleblower complaint. And the fact that you were supposed to deliver it under the law and you didn't do that suggests to us that this involves a principal in the White House and hand that baby over now. I paraphrase, by the way. And I wrote that, you know, I sort of said, well, to my readers on Facebook, this is what the world looks like to me today, and this is out there, and so on. And then, you know, the swelling was contained and I drove back to Boston. It's about a three hour drive from my home. By the time I got there, there were thousands of messages of people saying, we don't understand what's happening, what's going on. And I thought, well, you know, I'm not going to write another night simply because I hate people flooding the zone.
- [07:25]
Jane Butcher
Right.
- [07:25]
Heather Cox Richardson
That's never been my thing. And I'm like, I'm not going to write tonight. But then the next night, September 17, I started answering the questions that people asked. And I've written every night since. And all that I do is to explain to people the world in this moment as it applies to the American past. Like, where is the intersection between those two things? What are the themes at stake? And how can we see society changing? Because that's what historians study, is how societies change. So I'm really a creation of America in this moment. This was never driven by me. This was always driven by my readers and questions that people asked. And I happened to have the research skills and the writing skills to answer the questions they've got, and that's what I bring to the table.
- [08:13]
Al Letson
Yeah, speaking of history, and I'm jumping around because you just said something that's really interesting to me. But speaking of history, I'm curious, as a historian, what time in American history do you feel like is most similar to what we're going through right now? I'm not a historian. I know a little bit about history. And the thing that keeps coming to mind for me is Reconstruction, the Death of Reconstruction. Like right around the time when the Wilmington massacre happened.
- [08:43]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, in fairness, I wrote a book called the Death of Reconstruction, so you and I agree on that. I mean, I love Reconstruction, and we could actually spend the rest of this time just talking about Reconstruction. And there are so many parallels between what happened during Reconstruction and what happened now. But I would like to point out that there is an even larger parallel in this moment between what is happening now and what happened in the 1850s, when there was a small minority of the American people who decided that the whole idea of people being created equal was ridiculous and said so. By the way, Alexander Stevens says that in the Cornerstone speech in early 1861 that the framers of the country had it wrong by saying that people are created equal. And in fact, they say people are not created equal, and it's imperative for white men to control everybody else. The black Americans, they don't really talk that much in that era about indigenous Americans, although there's certainly a history of that. They do talk about Chinese people. They're not Chinese Americans yet, but Chinese people coming into the west coast and Irish coming into the East Coast. And they certainly talk about women. But what they try and do is to create an entire new nation based on what Stevens calls the cornerstone of American enslavement. This is going to be the whole point of their country that white men get to rule. And if you look at the accelerating pace of the attempt in this moment to tear down our American democracy and replace it with a world in which a very few very wealthy white men control both the resources and the rights of everybody else. The parallels between the 1850s and this moment are, first of all, extraordinarily obvious. But second of all, the real difference between those two eras is that in the 1860s, those people took their marbles and went home. In this one, they have seized control of the American government. So in many ways, it feels like we are, in fact, simply replaying the Civil War, but this time on the turf of the U.S. government.
- [10:59]
Al Letson
Yeah. As a young man who grew up in the. In the South, I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, which, you know, I tell people all the time, is really culturally more southern Georgia than it is North Florida. My Experience was that the south actually won the Civil War. Because everywhere I was as a young man, there were Confederate signs. You know, I'm 54, and so when I grew up, Confederate flags everywhere. There was the school that I was supposed to graduate from that I did not go to, mostly because I was in love with a girl at another school and I refused to leave that school. But I could also stand on my morals and say, I refuse to go to Nathan Bedford Forest High School. So for me, as a young black man, there was literally no difference between, like, the south winning or the north winning. The only difference being that, like, slavery wasn't instituted. But I was definitely a second class citizen. And what I'm seeing now is that, like, that war is. The Civil War has really just been a cold war ever since it ended. And, like, right now, we're just seeing it warm up.
- [12:09]
Heather Cox Richardson
So I don't know if you just did your prep incredibly well or if we're just on the same wavelength. I also wrote a book called how the South Won the Civil War.
- [12:18]
Al Letson
No, we're just on the same wavelength.
- [12:23]
Heather Cox Richardson
So I would say that there's a lot of different places we could go with that. Because the resurgence of the concept of the American Confederacy really takes off after Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. And one of the really interesting dives there is what that's gonna look like. What are the political parties gonna do with the fact that black and brown Americans are now voting or are going to be voting in increasing numbers, especially after the Voting Rights act of 1965? So what you get is you get the Brown v. Board, and with Brown v. Board, you get the resurgence of this idea of the American cowboy, which is very much an image of Reconstruction that it designed in that era by former Confederates to suggest that a real American was an individualist guy who didn't need the federal government for anything. And they set that up in contrast to the federal government, which by 1871 they were calling a socialist government because it was protecting the rights of black Americans, especially in South Carolina. But black Americans in the south, you get the rise of that image. And then of course, you get the real pressure in the country for the passage first of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights act of 1965, just before you were born and shortly after I was born. And that actually raises a real question for the political parties. What are you going to do when you suddenly have this influx of black and brown voting? And one of the things that happens is that it really looks like the Democratic Party and the American South, a lot of it, are going to embrace the idea of black voting. They're going to embrace this idea of a multicultural democracy. You get the rise of Jimmy Carter in Georg, and that is a real thing. And you think about the ways in which especially young people were flocking to Jimmy Carter and the degree to which he picked up the support of people like the Allman Brothers. Remember that? The Allman Brothers and I believe the Charlie Daniels Band, certainly Lynyrd Skynyrd. And that was really interesting because Leonard Skynyrd is gonna fly that Confederate flag, right? For a long time. They're gonna take it down. They're eventually, by 75, they're gonna be saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't be flying this flag. But they. Those images of what that conflated flag could mean, because what it does in that period when it is associated with that New south, which is literally what they call it, is it seems to represent the idea of this multicultural democracy. And it gets picked up in the north by people who are opposed to the Vietnam War. So they too are standing against that old guard. And this is when you start to see that Confederate battle flag, by the way, being spread across the country. But I mean, it's a really interesting moment if you think about it. You get this moment that feels like it's going somewhere. And I've been fascinated by this and see what you think of this. This is 75 about. We're talking 75, 76, which is the year that Bruce Springsteen gets the COVID of both Time and Newsweek. At the same time, you've got Leonard Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers and so on, tying that together with sort of anti establishment North. Are you with me so far?
- [15:38]
Al Letson
Yep, I'm with you, Al.
- [15:40]
Heather Cox Richardson
You're sort of like, well, maybe. Where's this going?
- [15:42]
Al Letson
No, no, no, I'm here. Keep going, keep going.
- [15:44]
Heather Cox Richardson
But then think about what also happens in that era. You get Greg Allman going to prison and you get the plane crash that took down Leonard Skynyrd, right? And that potential for music to push that New south forward shatters right there in the middle of the 70s. And at the same time, you get the real pushback among the radical right to that Confederate imagery and also to get rid of that modern American state that is protecting black and brown voting. And I'm not implying at all that this is all a reflection of the fact there was a plane crash. But you really see in the middle 70s, the potential for creating a multicultural democracy and the backlash that that inspires not only by the way, against black and brown Americans, but also against women. And that's the 70s become, I think, the real hinge that says, hey, wait a minute, that multicultural democracy can't exist. And so when you think about the period from the Civil War forward, I actually don't think it has been a steady drip of the Confederacy returning. I think you actually see a real ebb and float. And we're at this extraordinary ebb right now, but I don't think it's inevitable.
- [17:04]
Al Letson
Coming up on MORE TO THE story.
- [17:06]
Heather Cox Richardson
Believe me, I'm worried about where we're going. Just don't even start me. But I am heartened in this moment by the number of people who are rediscovering that they do have agency to change the future. And of course, that's always been the story of our democracy.
- [17:21]
Al Letson
But before we get to that, I just want to thank our listeners who have taken the time to to match those five stars on your favorite podcasting app. Your ratings and reviews mean the world to me, but more importantly, it helps others find our show. Our conversations like this one with Heather Cox Richardson are important now more than ever. You can help spread the word by just liking the show. All right. Thank you. And more with Heather in a minute.
- [17:54]
Heather Cox Richardson
You know, Every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast. We bring you three essential stories. the heart of each story are questions what really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At npr, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why.
- [18:23]
Al Letson
This is More TO the story. I'm Al Letson and I'm talking with writer and historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson. The things that we, I think a lot of us knew about this country, you begin to understand that they were polite agreements and not actual things that that had the law behind it that could stand in place or that it does not work if you have someone who doesn't care about the law and you don't have the system. I can clearly remember being in high school in my civics class and my teacher who was an amazing teacher, I wish I could remember his name, he was so great. But I clearly remember him talking about checks and balances and how important it was. And now to see that you have an administration who doesn't really care about checks and balances and you have a Congress that doesn't care about doing their job with the checks and balances. So everything becomes off kilter and cast in the image of the president.
- [19:27]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, I would agree with that, except I'm gonna put a caveat around the concept of Congress not caring. These are Republicans in Congress, and that's a really big deal. Because, in fact, there are certainly ways that I would love to see our system adjusted and our Constitution adjusted, which is, after all, what the framers expected that we would to amend the Constitution. And we have done so. But what you've really seen is a group of people who belong to a political party who no longer care about enforcing the laws. And that it's not a question of sort of there being. We talk about there being sort of gentlemen's agreements, but that's not actually what the issue is here. We literally have people who are abdicating their responsibility to honor their oaths of office because they care about political power. They care about power, and they are creating a feedback loop for themselves. And that I think. And I would love to hear where you identify that weak link. Because back in 74, of course, the Republicans did take down Richard Nixon for far less than Donald Trump and many of his people around him have done. And not just Trump, by the way, members of the Republican Party elsewhere have done. But I look at that, and I think about the many places that this started. It did not start in 2015. It started in 1986 with the idea of the Reagan Republicans that they needed to start getting rid of black voting because they were not gonna be able to preserve Reagan's second set of tax cuts. Cause they were unpopular.
- [21:05]
Al Letson
Right, right.
- [21:06]
Heather Cox Richardson
And the number of times that Americans dropped the ball is partly, I think, because we have a normalcy bias. But also, I look at that and I honestly blame the media and historians. I mean, I'm gonna throw myself in that because they didn't raise the alarms when they could have. And I remember teaching signing statements and signing statements were sort of typical here. You helped with this. Have a pen. Until Reagan, when somebody in the Department of Justice said we could use signing statements as a way to increase the power of the executive to do actually what he wants and to ignore Congress. And the person who wrote that memo, by the way, is a guy named Samuel Alito. You might have heard of him.
- [21:54]
Al Letson
Yeah.
- [21:54]
Heather Cox Richardson
And I remember teaching that and talking about how by the time you get to George W. Bush, Congress passes a law and says, no torture. We are not going to torture in this country. And Bush issued a signing statement saying, I'm going to do whatever I want because I have the right to protect the country. And no one seemed to care. And I remember my hair being on fire going, I don't care if you're pro Bush or anti Bush. He's saying he gets to legislate. And I don't know where that slip happened, where people were like, oh, well, what's on TV tonight? And like I say I blame people like me and the journalists who didn't say, oh my God. But I think that we need to figure out, because in order to reclaim that space, we gotta figure out where the weak links were.
- [22:44]
Al Letson
You know, I'd never thought about this term before you said it, but I think that normalcy bias, like, sums up a lot of reasons why things just happen the way they do. And nobody raises a fuss because it just feels normal. And so therefore, you know, I think most Americans care about their country, but also I think most Americans are very concerned with the bottom line of how they're going to feed their children, how they like, they want their children to go to a good school, they want, you know, they're trying to get through the daily day to day how we survive. And I think that like, if people are in that mode of how we go from A to B, they're not really thinking about how we go from A to Z, right? Like the long arc of it, they're thinking about the short arc. And the short arc is taking up all of their computing power. And so as long as everything feels normal, it's like you're just kind of going along to get along. I think. I mean, that would be my theory.
- [23:50]
Heather Cox Richardson
I would argue that that is actually a deliberate.
- [23:53]
Al Letson
Oh, I agree.
- [23:55]
Heather Cox Richardson
You keep people poor, then they can't think about the next person over. And if you look at the places in American history where race and gender relations have improved, they're always times of economic prosperity. So you take away economic prosperity, then you turn against the guy who took your job, not the guy who pulled the strings to make him able to take your job. But I have a question for you. And that is one of the things. I'm about a decade older than you are. And one of the things that really worries me in a big way is I think if you are under 55 in this country, you don't remember a time when democracy worked. And that strikes me that the younger you get that I see so many people who are willing to throw out the system saying, oh, it never worked. And in fact it's never worked perfectly. I would argue that that's the whole point of democracy. It's never done. But I worry a lot that we are not going to be able to rebuild a healthy society because so many people are like, screw it. There's no point.
- [25:02]
Al Letson
I don't know. But what I do know is that I believe that all my life, the idea of democracy has not fully worked. But the idea of democracy is like this shining thing that you should strive for. We have not seen, and I don't know if we ever will see a perfect version of what democracy is, but life is never perfect. Life is messy. And I think that, like, you know, regardless of whether we have seen it or not, it is the thing to strive for.
- [25:40]
Heather Cox Richardson
One of the things that always jumps out to me is how in other countries that are already under an authoritarian boot, they are fighting so desperately for a right to have a say in their government. And we sit here in the US and say, hey, yeah, you go. And then we turn around and say, but there's no reason to protect it here. And that seems to me to be an odd split as well. You know, I'm worried about where. Believe me, I'm worried about where we're going. Just don't even start me. But I am heartened in this moment by the number of people who are rediscovering that they do have agency to change the future. And, of course, that's always been the story of our democracy. One of my favorite stories is that, you know, Thomas Jefferson, and it's kind of a joke with me and my friend Joanne how much I loathe Thomas Jefferson.
- [26:24]
Al Letson
But, oh, my God, yes, I cannot.
- [26:27]
Heather Cox Richardson
It's the whole, I am so special that I don't have to have any ethics at all. And yet I'm gonna talk as if I'm God. But so there's this wonderful thing he writes the Declaration of Independence, which, by the way, he cribs from a lot of places. But he, you know, it is one of the greatest documents in human history. There's just no doubt about that. But as soon as he writes it, Benjamin Banneker, who's a scientist in this era, writes, and he's like, dude, Benjamin Banneker's black writes. And he's like, dude, great. These are great ideas, but what about the people you're enslaving? And I love that before the ink is dry on that document, people are already saying, we totally agree. What about us? And that, I think, has been the genius of America. If you think about our great heroes, they're the people who have said, what about us? Or what about Them, in case they were people who were already in positions of privilege. And that's where you get the amazing ideas and the new ways to look at society and the new languages and all the things that have really shaped an American culture, the United States of American culture. And one of the things about this moment that I always like to emphasize is that authoritarians are. They operate according to a blue book. They're all the same. They really are all the same. They have the same. I mean, maybe they operate in different languages and they have, you know, all the different sort of flavors, but it's all the same thing. You know, it's different flavors of ice cream, if you will. Responses to that are everything. They're everywhere. They're art, they're literature, their clothing, their writings, their tv. And that, to me, is sort of the heart of where we need to be right now in terms of reinventing what this country is, is, and could be.
- [28:22]
Al Letson
Yeah. So let me ask you this, which I wanna look back a little bit, but really it's about the future. Right. The thing that I worry about is, and you just said it so well with normalcy bias, is that the Trump administration has really done a lot of damage to the American experiment. I worry that, let's say everything that has been predicted by the pundits and the people looking at the numbers or whatever, that a blue wave comes in, we get a Congress that is Democratic, and then two years later we get a Democratic president. I am concerned that normalcy bias will just tick in and instead of correcting all of the messes, instead of holding people accountable for the corruption that happened in these four years, that we will just kind of go forth. So that's the basis of this question. But I wanna rewind and ask, do you see Merrick Garland as one of the problems that got us into this situation? Because when I talk to a lot of people, so many people are so angry at Merrick Garland for not holding people accountable. And I don't know enough about it. So I was just curious if you felt the same way.
- [29:50]
Heather Cox Richardson
So I'm gonna go back even further than that, back to Reconstruction. And that is we have many, I guess I'll say, original sins in this country, but not holding the Confederate leaders responsible after the Civil War. Power is huge to me. To me, that was a direct assault on the rule of law. And it came because of the fact that Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was a Democrat himself and who was hoping to rebuild the Democratic Party. And he went in the summer of 1865. So this was always confusing to me before I started studying Reconstruction. People sometimes don't know that Congress was not in session when Lincoln was assassinated. They had all gone home on the day of Lincoln's second inaugural. They had worked all night in Congress, and then they had ended the session and they'd gone home. And normally, if there is a crisis, the President can call the Congress back into session, which is what Lincoln did in the summer of 61. And when Lincoln is assassinated, the Congress people were like, okay, we're on our way back to Washington. And Johnson's like, no, no, no, we're good. I got this. So they do, in fact, come back to Washington, but Johnson won't call them into session, so they really don't have any authority. And over the course of summer 1865, he pardons all but about 1500 of the former Confederates less than a year before, they were literally shooting at members of the United States of America. And he's like, never mind. Come back in and remember that because of the census in 1870 and the fact that it would count black Americans as full people rather than three people, fifths of a person, they would have more say after the Civil War than they did before it. So the fact that there was never an attempt to hold any of those people to account, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they would be found guilty or not. But the idea that the rule of law would be preserved, I think is echoed in the modern era by the fact that that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. If Richard Nixon had gone to trial, I don't even care if he was found guilty. If he had gone to trial and what he had done had been exposed, I don't think we would have had the Iran Contra affair. I don't think we would have had weapons of mass destruction. And I don't think that Donald Trump would have run for president because it would have emphasized that the rule of law held over everybody. That's in the past. We can't change that. What we can change is recognizing that we need to learn from that and say if the Democrats do, in fact, regain power. And by the way, I don't think it's Democrats versus Republicans at this point. I think it's people who care about the country versus those who are trying to impose authoritarianism, that we need to start holding people accountable. Not even on day one, on minute one. And I don't just mean the principles. I mean every single person who supported this or enabled this, it. Because this has been a stain on our country since at least 1865. And we must indicate that the rule of law really truly does apply. Whether you're rich, whether you're powerful, whether you're poor, whether you're an undocumented immigrant, you have the protection of the legal system and you have the need to respond to its accountability.
- [33:34]
Al Letson
Given all that, how do you define patriotism today?
- [33:39]
Heather Cox Richardson
Oh, that's easy. I define patriotism as Americans retaking their agency to protect democracy. And when I say democracy, here's what I'm defending. The right to be treated equally before the law. Everybody, everybody. Rich, poor, undocumented. The people in Delaney Hall. To Donald Trump. Trump, be treated equally before the law. The right to have a say in your government. You get the right to vote. You get the right to protest, you get the right to petition your government. You get the right to have a say in the way you are governed. And the right to equal access to resources. And by that, I don't just mean gold in the California hills or whatever people thought about when they were putting together these ideas, but the right now to healthcare and to education and to the things that enable you to work hard and to prosper in. However that looks to you and the people who are now trying to create an authoritarian government, they are dangerous radicals who are trying to destroy what we have had for almost 250 years in this country. And so that's what I say when I talk about being a patriot. I don't care what letter comes after your name. That's what you are standing for.
- [35:00]
Al Letson
Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for coming onto the show.
- [35:04]
Heather Cox Richardson
Thank you for having me. Can we do it again? This is a real joy. Except we gotta find something to fight about.
- [35:08]
Al Letson
Yeah, I know.
- [35:10]
Heather Cox Richardson
Let's fight about. I'm sure we have different tastes in music. We should do that.
- [35:14]
Al Letson
I don't. Okay, we can. I mean, tell me.
- [35:17]
Heather Cox Richardson
I don't know anything about rap. I didn't know anything about rap.
- [35:19]
Al Letson
I don't like. I don't listen to. I mean, I listen to a little bit of rap, but I don't. That was historian, writer and social media star Dr. Heather Cox Richardson. Be sure to check out her substack Letters from an American and her new video project, 250 to 250, celebrating the people who have worked to ensure that everyone has a say in our democracy. We'll put links in our show notes. If you like this episode, I think you should check out our reveal episode with Nicole Hannah Jones Jones, Jelani Cobb and Tremaine Lee. Three discussions about black journalists fighting to tell a more inclusive American story. We'll put a link in our show notes. Lastly, to keep up with everything we're doing here, sign up for our free newsletter by going to revealnews.org newsletter and we'll send the latest from our newsroom in a weekly email. That's revealnews.org newsletter. This episode was produced produced by members of the Justice Society, Josh sanburn and Carl McGurk. Allison with help from Joni Binder, edited by James West Theme music and engineering helped by Fernando My Man Yo Arruda and Jay Breezy. Mr. Jim Briggs, I'm Al Edson and you know, let's do this again next week. This is more to the story. From prx.