Follow the historians.

This is a perilous moment in history. Don't take it from me though. Take it from them.

Lately, a lot of people have asked me who I follow when it comes to politics. What I’m watching, what I’m reading, how I get “both sides.”

I’m less interested in “both sides” than I’m interested in the truth. You may differ (hold your enemies close and all that) but I have zero need to watch a veritable propaganda network spewing Russian talking points, or a website running boldface clickbait headlines about DEMOCRATS HELLBENT ON DESTROYING AMERICA, PUPPIES, AND GOD HIMSELF.

I learn nothing, and it just makes me want to drink wine.

You know who I do listen to though?

I listen to historians.

Please tell me you listen to Heather Cox Richardson, too.

I also follow pundits, legal scholars, educators, activists, elected officials, and some straight-shooters with whom don’t always agree. But there’s something about the historians because they don’t just tell me what I’m hoping to hear — they tell me what I may or may not want to hear, and bring receipts to back it up.

I thought I’d share a few you probably know, and a few you might not:

Heather Cox Richardson

If Letters from an American is not the greatest, most valuable Substack of the century, then I don’t know what is. I will not start my day before reading Richardson’s daily Substack, and that includes Wordle, which is saying something. The reason she’s most successful writer on the platform is in part because of how plainly and clearly she writes about even the most complex news of the day, always providing historical context to help us better understand what might come next. In a world of firebrands, she’s a thoughtful, steady rudder (though she would have a far better metaphor to offer than that). Her list of linked sources at the end of each article is like dessert — sometimes you save it for later so you can really enjoy it. And somehow, on top of daily posts, she still has time to teach history at Boston College.

PS Her knowledge of the past makes her, as with most historians, prescient: Two years ago to the date on Twitter, she called out the “full-blown constitutional crisis” of a SCOTUS “gone rogue.”

Read: June 27, 2024 for post-debate analysis and explanation of the “Gish gallop” debate technique, which is a term now in the common vernacular That’s because of this piece. (Substack)

Kevin M. Kruse

Kevin and I became mutuals on Twitter when things started getting ugly in 2016, and I continue to appreciate his fearlessness on Threads and BlueSky in speaking truth to power. He’s a professor of American history at Princeton, focused on the 20th-century, and more specifically, conflicts over race, rights, segregation, the rise of religious nationalism, and the making of modern conservatism. I wish he published more on his excellent Substack Campaign Trails, but I can get my daily fill of him on Threads — he’s a prolific microblogger (what we used to call tweeting) and he offers passionate, witty, up-to-the-minute commentary and observations. The humor tempers the fear and the righteous outrage. I need to stop heart-ing every damn thing he publishes. Or maybe I don’t.

Read: The Radical Roberts Court (Substack)

Michael Bechloss

NBC News’s Presidential Historian and PBS Newshour commentator specializing oon the American Presidency, Bechloss is a prolific author with unimpeachable credentials (no pun intended). He’s a trustee of the White House Historical Association and the National Archives Foundation, sits on the board of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and has penned 9 books including several on fascinating untold stories of the Cold War and other national crises. So, yes, he has a whole lot of perspective on Russia Russia Russia. And everything else going on today. He’s more active on Twitter but I’m not, so I continue to follow him on Threads and look for his segments on TV — when I watch TV, which is rarer these days. But when I hear he will be on? I am far more likely to tune in.

Watch: “We have never seen anything remotely like this in U.S. History” (MSNBC)

Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-winning book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent: reshaped the lens through which I view our country more than any other, hands down. (I wrote about it in some detail here.) The night of January 5, 2021, I said to Jon, “I think we’re about to see what happens when the dominant caste believes they will lose their status to the lower caste.” She gave me that framework, and it’s spot on. On Instagram, she shares current events through the lens of Black American history, and sometimes her own family histories. She just writes so beautifully, with such clarity, and I never cease to learn something new. And something important.

Read: The history of the first Memorial Day, May 1, 1865.(Instagram)

Rachel Maddow

I became a Maddow fan in the mid-200s, by her voice alone. That’s when Air America arrived, offering an alternative to the monopoly of right-wing talk radio. Her show was a literal breath of fresh air starting at 7 AM, and her fellow radio hosts included names you might know, like Al Franken, Marc Maron, and

Thom Hartmann

. (Hey, now I’m being a historian!)

This is all to say, if you only know her as an MSNBC pundit, she is a brilliant author and true scholar of history, with a degree in public policy from Stanford before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where she earned a DPhil in Politics. She is unparalleled in teaching the past as prologue, weaving fascinating stories that connect seemingly unrelated past events to the present. In addition to her show on MSNBC each Monday night, I highly recommend listening to her historical podcast series, Ultra, and Ultra Season 2, which she’s turned into the best-selling book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. It could not be more timely. That’s not facetious by the way — you’ll know that too if you read the book.

Listen: The Prequel Audiobook. (Amazon, Libro.fm)

Michael Harriot

For a writer who doesn’t define himself as a historian per se, Harriot has taught me more about history — and in particular, Black American history and what we do and don’t know about it — than any history professor. He’s the author of the best-selling, highly lauded Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, which is wildly compelling, difficult in its revelations, and super beefy — I am still reading it, little by little, since I was lucky enough to have him sign it for me last fall. (That is typical of me by the way.) I originally discovered his bitingly sharp writing and unapologetic historical corrections through Twitter, his former columns on The Root, and now his columns on The Grio. He’s who I read when I want facts to make me uncomfortable. As we all know, discomfort is where the growth happens.

Watch: The origins of the word “woke” with W Kamau Bell (video clip on Twitter) with more details in this article about “Weaponizing Woke” (The Root).

Kevin Gannon

Another feisty, fun, and informative account we all lost to the Great Twitter Abandonment of ‘23 was “The Tattooed Prof.” I recently found him again on BlueSky, where he’s as prolific a poster and re-poster as it gets. You may recognize him as one of the historians interviewed in Ava Duvernay’s 13th, but his day job is Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte. Gannon’s forte is 19th-century American history (US and the Americas) including Civil War and Reconstruction, Colonial America, and the history of capitalism, along with race, justice, and inclusive pedagogy in education. He’s a good follow for reposts, because he’ll share articles and other commentary you couldn’t possibly keep up with. Like this kinda really buried NY Times reporting revealing that high grocery prices haven’t been due to inflation at all, but opportunistic price gouging since the pandemic.

As Gannon told the New Yorker in a 2020 article about Historian Twitter, “if we are going to continue to be a democratic society, we have to be honest about our history.”

And that’s why I follow the historians.

The honest historians.

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