Heather Cox Richardson

speaker

126 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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What A Day · Amending The Constitution For The 21st Century With Heather Cox Richardson · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

The Constitution is a really strong document that is based in tripwires, really. voice-verified

I mean, we call them checks and balances, but the idea is to prevent the rise of somebody like Donald Trump. voice-verified

And I hear people say, we need to throw out the Constitution. voice-verified

And my answer to that is, no, we need to enforce the Constitution. voice-verified

What a pleasure to be here. voice-verified

What I'm seeing around me is a real shift in American politics as Americans recognize once again that they have agency to change the direction of the country. voice-verified

And so what I've been thinking about are all the people in our past who sort of woke up one morning and didn't say, I know what I'm going to do today. voice-verified

I'm going to change the course of American history, but got up and did something that was important to them and that moved the ball forward and ended up changing the country. voice-verified

So to me, it's a really exciting moment where we're moving into a new phase and people are remembering that they can determine what the future looks like. voice-verified

What historians do is they study how and why societies change. voice-verified

And no, history does not repeat itself, although people are always going to people, right? voice-verified

So there are some themes in the way we behave. voice-verified

But what historians do is we take a look at what has changed society in the past, and we dig really deep into our sources. voice-verified

We try and figure out voice-verified

what moved the levers of change or didn't for that matter. voice-verified

So what we do as historians when we look at the past is to say, oh, look, here's a situation in which people changed the future by doing X or didn't change it by doing Y. So if you think about history that way, as a study of how societies change, it's actually really useful to look at the present and possibly even the future, recognizing that there's never gonna be a one-to-one correspondence, but you are able to say, for example, voice-verified

hey, religion was really important in this moment, or political movements were really important in this moment that looks a lot like today, or an individual was important and these are the characteristics of that individual. voice-verified

Well, see, that's a great example of what history does. voice-verified

You can absolutely make that comparison in going into what the 1920s looked like with the rise of the KKK and the immigration restrictions and the concentration of wealth among a really small group of people. voice-verified

And that, of course, led to the Great Crash and the Great Depression and so on. voice-verified

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