American Conversations: Vanessa Williamson (Heather Cox Richardson, March 30, 2026)

Click here for full video on YouTube. Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. Her new book, The Price of Democracy, reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history. Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to make observations about contemporary American politics. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. She is the author, most recently, of the best-selling Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She publishes a daily newsletter on Substack about the history behind today's politics. She is seemingly everywhere. Thankfully. Stay in touch with HCR wherever you are: https://linktr.ee/heathercoxrichardson <— Return to sketchnote collection