Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson, author of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, discusses the significance of presidential candidate Donald Trump refusing to say if he’ll accept the result of the 2016 election.
Heather Cox Richardson is an expert in nineteenth-century America, specializing in politics and economics. Her first four books explored the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West, and stretched from the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln to that of Theodore Roosevelt.The Death of Reconstruction, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, and West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War were all selections of the History Book Club; West from Appomattox was also an Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of: The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. Her most recent book, To Make Men Free, A History of the Republican Party From 1854 To The Present, was released in 2014. Richardson is president of The Historical Society, an organization that seeks to bring academic history to general readers; her blog posts for its website won the Cliopatria Award. Her expertise has been utilized by the New York Times, Bloomberg News, CNN.com, the BBC, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, C-SPAN and Huffington Post, among other media.