One night in mid-November, a gentle-throng of several dozen people packed the Books-a-Million bookstore in South Portland. Clutching signed books, the sold-out standing-room-only audience waited in line to hear Heather Cox Richardson speak.
“It’s riveting to me, every single one that she writes" said Wendy from Casco Bay while in line. "It's the first thing I read every morning."
"Me, too!" added Chris Green from Northampton. "I pop on Facebook and find where she posted."
Wendy laughed. "I feel like I’m a groupie, for sure!”
Richardson was there in South Portland promoting her New York Times best-selling book, Democracy Awakening. The book examines the current state of American democracy by way of American history: per Richardson, "a compendium of the questions that people ask me every day."
An accomplished 19th-century American history scholar and professor at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson has a fervent following hardly seen amongst academics. Over 1.3 million people subscribe to her "Letters from an American" Substack newsletter, where Richardson discusses national issues using historical analysis.
“I didn’t really realize until I started reading her newsletter how little I understood about United States history," said Susan Gorman from Bedford. "I feel like [her writing is] such a generous gift that she’s given.”
Richardson started her Substack in 2019 after the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. Every weekday since she's posted to her Substack 1,200-word essays written the night before that dissect U.S. politics. Despite the footnotes and historical citations, the entries read like emails sent to you by a friend. That’s made Richardson extremely appealing to an audience looking for an anchored take on the news.
She's been on a nationwide book tour since the release of "Democracy Awakening" in late September. Having grown up in nearby Yarmouth, the South Portland location provided Richardson the feeling of a hometown crowd.
"In that audience was the earliest friend I made when my family picked up from Chicago and moved to Yarmouth," said Richardson in an interview reflecting on the South Portland event. "Literally she was the first person I saw in that second grade classroom. She wasn’t the only one [in attendance] — other friends from Yarmouth came as well."
While her use of historical analysis to navigate modern day politics may be new and novel for some, Richardson says she’s always used history to understand her surroundings since her childhood.
"History to me was just the stories that people told," said Richardson. "We grew up with elderly people in town who could tell us stories all the way back to the early 20th-century. You met somebody and you got to know who they were by the stories that they told. That is quite literally how I see the world.”
Richardson’s family goes back generations in Maine. While she keeps an apartment in Boston when she teaches at Boston College, she lives fulltime on the midcoast, where her family roots run deep.
"I live on land that belonged to ancestors in the late 18th century," said Richardson. " It didn’t stay in the family [and I've only since] bought some of it back, but there’s a rock in the harbor that was named for my grandmother’s where she learned to swim in the late 19th century. I feel very privileged to live in a place where I can look around and see the marks of my ancestors.”
On the occasional days off she takes from writing "Letters from an American," Richardson will post a photograph to her newsletter for her followers to view: typically a landscape of the Maine coast photographed by her lobsterman husband, Buddy. Beyond the visual components, Richardson sees the sense of community within her writing as being influenced by Maine’s small-town atmosphere.
“[Being from a small town], it’s not idyllic. Anybody who’s lived in a small town knows that there’s drug abuse, and spousal abuse, and alcohol abuse," said Richardson. "But there is also charity. And by that, I mean graciousness [and] the idea of helping each other out — real caring. And if you’re from elsewhere, you don’t necessarily have that sense of an entire community being one.”
Yet it's "elsewhere" that Richardson will be spending much of the coming year. She'll be traveling on-and-off for her book tour right up to next November’s election. And while she’s away from Maine, Richardson says she'll remember the smell of the mudflats to remind her of home:
“There is something about it for me when you first drive out of Portland and you pass that big stretch there of water [in Casco Bay]," said Richardson. "It’s very beautiful when the water when the tides high. But when it’s low and you can smell the mud flats, you know you're home.”
