LETTERS RECEIVED BY A CANADIAN
- Oct 3
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 9
I keep being sent and encountering in the wilds of the internet essays from social commentator and professor of American history Heather Cox Richardson. She has a Substack with millions of subscribers, titled Letters from an American, a daily newsletter and the requisite podcast, too. All those deliver her scholarly, history-informed take on current events to a nations-worth of inboxes and feeds. My first real encounter with the professor was some years ago when I was compelled to read her essay and listen to a related interview she gave on PBS about gun control in America, or rather the lack thereof. Despite being on the same page about the wild overabundance of firearms in the US and the nation’s lack of discomfort with such easy and regular public executions, I was positively shocked to find her putting into writing a whole menagerie of, frankly, silly anecdotes and explanations. In paragraph after paragraph she misread aspects of popular culture and misrepresented whole political movements and major historical events all while reframing the origins and implementation of gun legislation. That’s a lot of revisionist history in one document, even for a historian. And so I went and spelled all that out in my own essay, titled She Loves Her Guns.
