Heather Cox Richardson

How the South Won the Civil War argues that the oligarchic order defeated at Appomattox was rebuilt in the West rather than abolished, and that the cowboy and the homesteader carried the same hierarchy under a different sky. Oxford University Press published it in 2020. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College who has spent her career on the Republican party and Reconstruction, and she reaches a far larger readership through Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter begun in 2019 that now goes to well over a million subscribers. Historians who share her politics have still queried how far the western thesis stretches, since the book is a synthesis carrying a long argument rather than a monograph. Her other books include To Make Men Free and Democracy Awakening.