Institution: Boston College

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and 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. She is a founder and editor at werehistory.org, which presents professional history to a public audience through short articles. Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On. Most 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 tens of thousands of subscribers making her, as of December 2020, the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack.