Astead Herndon

I'd give us like a C plus.

The Declaration of Independence, the women's rights movement, the invention of basketball or the iPhone, all good.

Slavery, colonialism, income inequality, unequivocally bad.

But what's gonna determine the next 250 years of America?

And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve?

That's this week on America Actually.

Let's dig in.

Joining me now is Heather Cox Richardson.

She's a historian and professor at Boston College, but you probably know her from her very popular sub stack, Letters from an American, and her YouTube channel.

I am excited that Heather is joining us because she's going to help us think about not only the future, but how the past connects to it.

Thank you for coming.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

I appreciate that.

I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work.

As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal.

I wondered how you thought about those reinventions.

What forces shaped them?

And are we in a reinvention period right now?

Now, what forces shape these kind of shifts in the country?

I don't know if it's reinvention is the right word, but if we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity?