Although social media may not be a typical source of enlightenment, historian Heather Cox Richardson decided to become an exception to the rule.
It all started during the 2019 impeachment when Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing historical background for the daily torrent of news. It soon morphed into a popular Substack newsletter, "Letters From an American," and a readership that swelled to more than two million readers dedicated to her take on both past and present.
In Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Richardson's narrative explains how over time a small group of wealthy people have, in her view, made war on American ideals and created a disaffected population. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history and principles that marginalized Americans have always upheld.
Richardson condenses the content of news feeds into coherent stories. She aims to pinpoint what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. Through her rich historical knowledge, Richardson can pivot from the Founders to the abolitionists, from the New Deal to Mitch McConnell, and anywhere in between. Some topics reverberate throughout history, like the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus, and movement conservatism.
Democracy Awakening offers an explanation for how we arrived at this point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and how this history serves as a roadmap for the nation’s future and shows us what democracy can be.
Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor of History at Boston College. 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. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is the cohost of the Vox podcast, Now & Then.