05/05/2026
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She reads letters from the 1850s and sees a pattern people kept saying "someone will fix this" right up until 750,000 Americans died in civil war.
There's a moment that keeps appearing in the letters and diaries of ordinary Americans in the 1850s. Different handwriting, different contexts, different parts of the country—but the sentiment is remarkably, chillingly consistent:
Someone will fix this. The leaders will step in. This too shall pass.
Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor at Boston College who has spent her career reading these documents—the ones most historians skip over. Private correspondence between family members. Local newspapers from towns nobody remembers. Speeches given in halls that no longer exist. She's looking for something specific: how ordinary people talked about their own time before they knew how the story would end.
What she finds is a pattern. A psychological phenomenon historians now call "normalcy bias."
When conditions become frightening and uncertain, humans instinctively reach for past experiences that resolved themselves peacefully. We tell ourselves this moment is like that other moment, and that one turned out fine, so this one will too. It's not ignorance. It's not weakness. It's how our minds protect us from constant panic in the face of circumstances we cannot fully control.
But Richardson's research reveals where this reasoning leads when the moment is genuinely unprecedented.
In the late 1850s, political rhetoric was escalating to levels Americans had never experienced. Compromises that had held the nation together for decades were unraveling. Conversations between neighbors who'd disagreed politely for years were suddenly not polite anymore. Something fundamental was changing in the fabric of everyday American life.
Most people kept living their lives. There were farms to tend, businesses to run, families to feed. Whatever this tension was, it would blow over. Someone would work it out. It always had before.
Then 750,000 Americans died in a civil war—the deadliest conflict in the nation's entire history. A catastrophe that echoed through generations and whose wounds still haven't fully healed.
Looking back from our perspective, we can see the signs everywhere. The trajectory feels obvious. But to the people living through 1857, nothing was obvious. That's Richardson's entire point.
She keeps circling back to one uncomfortable truth in all her research: democracies are not self-healing organisms. They don't automatically stabilize when pressure builds. They're maintained by deliberate, continuous participation from citizens who understand that the system only works if enough people actively work to maintain it.
When enough people assume the system will hold itself together, when enough people decide it's someone else's responsibility to fix things, when enough people retreat into private life and hope the storm passes—the system doesn't maintain itself.
It bends. Then it breaks.
But Richardson also shows the other pattern in the historical record. The suffragists who fought for 72 years, many dying before they could vote. The civil rights activists who faced state violence and kept organizing anyway. The labor organizers who were beaten and arrested and kept building unions. These movements succeeded not because conditions were favorable, but because people refused to wait for someone else to act.
The question Richardson poses through her work isn't whether change is possible. History proves it is. The question is whether enough people will decide it's their job to make it happen—or whether they'll keep waiting for someone else to fix things while the foundations crumble.
She reads those letters from the 1850s—good people, caring people, people who genuinely believed someone would step in and prevent catastrophe—and she sees what that belief cost them.
750,000 dead. A nation torn apart. Generations scarred.
Because everyone kept waiting for someone else to act
