Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Now we know why President Donald J. Trump recently began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday. The journalists say the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a...

On April 18, Heather Cox Richardson was invited to speak at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago. Here is what she said on that day. Two hundred and fifty years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge. Seven thousand residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families. The two groups coexisted uneasily. Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw...

Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington DC on June 8, in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state. In January 2024, Trump pressured Republican lawmakers to kill a bipartisan immigration measure that would...

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – Thomas Paine, “The American Crisis” These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence. In that act,...