text: tags: historians, Heather Cox Richardson, Heather Ann Thompson, Carol Anderson, Voter Suppression, Kevin Kruse, Stacey Abrams
  Since her book “Lead From the Outside” came out in paperback last month, Stacey Abrams has been showing up in places befitting a woman whose razor-thin loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race turned her into a national political star.
  On “Morning Joe,” she parried questions about a possible presidential run. On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert surprised her by reading from one of the romance novels she has published under a pseudonym.
  But last Friday, Ms. Abrams dropped in on a much quieter venue: the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Ben Franklin, which bills itself as the oldest cultural institution in the United States.
  It wasn’t a stop on Ms. Abrams’s book tour. Instead, she was there to participate in an intimate two-hour conversation about the history of voter suppression with four leading scholars. It will be published next year by the University of Georgia Press as part of a new series calledHistory in the Headlines, which aims to bring historical expertise to bear on today’s most hotly debated issues.
  The Trump era has been a red-alert moment for many historians, who have mobilized in the classroom, on op-ed pages and on social media to combat what they see as the erosion of democratic norms and an attack on truth itself.