LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
“The biggest newsletter in the world is a history professor explaining today, nightly.”
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Subscribe to Letters from an American if you want the day's political news explained calmly, with sources, by a historian who tells you what it rhymes with. Skip it if you want quick headlines or a view from the right; this is one scholar's pro-democracy vantage, written long and nightly.
| Price | Free; every letter is free to read |
|---|---|
| Paid tier | $5 a month or $50 a year; supports the work and unlocks commenting plus occasional paid-only threads. No letter is ever paywalled |
| Cadence | Nightly, essentially daily since 2019; in our ten-night window, nine full letters and one day-off photograph post |
| Arrives | Late night to overnight ET: 11:38 pm to 2:29 am in every sampled letter |
| Read time | About 6 minutes (measured average 1,454 words) |
| Length | 531 to 2,156 words in our sample; most letters run 1,000 to 2,000 |
| Ads per issue | None; she accepts no sponsorships or brand partnerships (zero in our sample) |
| Emails / week | About 7 letters, including many weekends; podcast episodes and chat posts also appear some days |
| Publisher | Independent (Heather Cox Richardson), on Substack |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Readership | Over 2,900,000 subscribers per Substack's own count; Growth In Reverse estimates revenue above $1 million a month, around $12M a year for 2026 |
| Ad model | Reader-funded only; no ads, no sponsors, ever |
Who should read Letters from an American?
This is the largest publication on Substack, with the platform showing over 2,900,000 subscribers, and it earned its scale one nightly letter at a time. TIME named Richardson the most-subscribed individual creator on Substack. There is also a Spanish edition, Cartas de una estadounidense.
If the news cycle spikes your blood pressure, her calm historical framing is the antidote thousands of readers describe as grounding.
Every letter is a miniature lecture from a 30-year Boston College professor. You will learn actual history daily, not just takes.
The letters are long, nightly, and written from an explicitly pro-democracy liberal vantage. If you want brevity try 1440; if you want both sides argued, read Tangle.
What you actually get, in order
There are no section blocks and no gimmicks: each letter is continuous prose, one historian working through the day in order, with her sources listed at the end. Our sampled letters ran from Mike Lindell's primary loss to the anniversary of Nixon's resignation.
Why it's one of the best in its category
The story so far
In September 2019, as the whistleblower fight that led to the first Trump impeachment began, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson started writing nightly Facebook essays placing the day's events in historical context. Readers' questions kept coming; by the end of 2019 the letters moved to Substack under a name that nods to Alistair Cooke's Letters from America broadcasts and Crevecoeur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer.
Within a year she was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack, and the letters became the largest publication on the platform: over 2.9 million subscribers, an estimated $1 million-plus a month, every letter still free, no ad ever sold. TIME named her the most-subscribed individual creator on Substack; she has interviewed President Biden at the White House; her book Democracy Awakening became a New York Times bestseller.
Six-plus years on, the product is unchanged in the best way: one historian, one letter, nearly every night, sources at the end, photographs of the Maine coast on nights off, and now a Spanish edition, Cartas de una estadounidense. In an industry of pivots, the moat turned out to be a person who simply never stopped.