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Read the news these days can be depressing and deeply alarming. It can feel like all is lost amidst Trump 2.0.

I feel this way too often. I know many of you do too. One of the ways that I stay optimistic

is reading history to be reminded that America has faced very dark moments before and always come out on the other side. With that in mind, there was

no one better to talk to that Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, professor, and the author of

the wildly popular substack, letters from an American. Her long view approach is the perfect

prescription for this short-sighted era. I wanted to have her on the pod to get a perspective on how we got to this moment. And if there's anything that fuels her optimism in this dark chapter of American history, Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to Pod Save America. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited for this conversation. I've been wanting to talk to you for a very long time. Yours is the first substack I've ever subscribed to, 100 subsstacks later, but you were the first. Members of my friends and family are all huge fans of yours in your substack. They are very excited for this conversation. And I have no doubt that most of our audience is very familiar with who you are. I'm sure many of them subscribe to you, given that you're one of the most popular sub-stackers in the world. But I kind of want to start with your journey before we get into current events. How did you become such a media person where you write the substack where you're interviewing presidents, former presidents, like how did you make the leap from historian professor to substacker? Well, I'm laughing a little bit because when you call it a journey, it sounds like there was a plan involved and there certainly was not.

Listen, I'm a historian and what I really am interested in as a human being is what creates change.

That's what historians study is how societies either adapt to change, create change, or reject it. And that's what I'm

really interested in. And that's really all I do. And in order to understand those things as a

historian, you need to be able to take a really clear look at what is happening. And so I'm very

good at research at figuring out what just

happened. What are the rules by which things just happened? Where were the rules broken? How did this

change society? And that's really all I do and all I have ever done in front of a classroom when I write a book,

when I write the letters from an American, when I interview people, is to try and see how

they think, to see how they are changing society, because that's what I'm really interested in,

...