YouTube educator Tom Richey is not your average social media star. The internet sensation gained popularity for his online AP European History and AP US History lectures, as well as his occasional history-themed raps and music videos. The History expert has now amassed over 208,000 subscribers on YouTube and his videos have been watched in excess of 28 million times. Some of his videos – including The Senate and The House of Representatives Explained and The Thirty Years War – have been watched close to a million times. Richey currently teaches history in South Carolina.

The online history buff has loved history and politics since he was in middle school, and earned his degree in history in 2002 from Louisiana College before continuing his studies at Clemson University from 2006 to 2008. He began teach high school history courses after leaving Clemson in 2008 and launched his website TomRichey.net in the same year to help his students keep up with assignments and course materials. In 2012 he began to film video lectures so that students who had missed classes could keep up, and posted them on his YouTube channel, not realising that what he had started as an extension of his classroom would become a classroom for the world with more than 28 million views and 208,000 subscribers. Richey is honoured that people around the globe find his instructional materials helpful, and he is continuing to open his classroom up to the world through his YouTube channel and website.