Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
was the the reaffirmation that the country belongs to the american people and there was this sense that you know we were democracy the really interesting parallel for me though is 1876 when you think about this moment 1876 you've got obviously this extraordinary ongoing conflict
between the unreconstructed white Southerners in the American South and the majority of the country that's trying to make the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments real.
And then right before you get the celebration of the Declaration in 1876, you get the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
And the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when Lakotas and their allies
successfully repelled the 7th Cavalry resulted in the killing of Custer's unit, right, to a man.
And he was known as the boy general.
People sort of saw him as sort of the symbol of America in many ways.
So there is a sense like, wait a minute, what are we doing here?
Are we really going to be able to maintain this country?
And then you also have the rise of industrialization.
And nobody knows what that's going to mean because you're suddenly starting to see the depression of wages and people starting to work in factories and there's starting to be strikes and people worrying.
And there, too, what you saw was an attempt to reaffirm what the nation meant.
But it was obviously a nation that didn't quite know yet in that era what the future was going to look like.
What we learned from that era was that everybody's voice matters.
That we need to protect the rule of law, which did not happen immediately after in that period.
And the idea that everybody should have a stake in their government, should have a say in their government, which after all is guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence.
And one of the things about these centennials that matter, these celebrations of the Declaration with all the different names they have attached to them according to what number they are,
What they really do is they reaffirm those principles in the Declaration, and those are principles of a liberal democracy.
A liberal meaning the sense that it protects the individual, but it guarantees that they are treated equally before the law, that they have a right to a say in their government, and that they have equal access to resources.
And as people examine that and remember the extraordinary sacrifices it took to get us to that place, I think it helps to renew those principles in our society at large.
Showing 21–40 of 167 · page 2 of 9
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