Shelf Awareness, starred review: Historian Heather Cox Richardson (How the South Won the Civil War) dedicates Democracy Awakening to those who have joined her in "exploring the complex relationship between history, humanity, and modern politics"--a description that perfectly encapsulates not just those who may have inspired the book but also the book itself. The author of the popular newsletter Letters from an American offers an eye-opening history and her thoughts on the current state of U.S. democracy and asks: "Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles?"

Richardson doesn't quite answer this question in Democracy Awakening, instead providing much-needed historical and modern context for the question itself. She traces the historical roots of today's challenges to the democratic process, including deep analysis of the United States' framing documents (flawed though they may be), as well as the parallels between recent U.S. history and the rise of authoritarianism seen elsewhere through history and around the world. Even if the individual facts here may not surprise those who have spent time studying the relatively short history of the U.S., seeing these threads in one place brings the current political crisis into sharp relief in ways those familiar with Richardson's work will recognize. "But the true history of American democracy is that it is never finished," she writes, acknowledging that while this moment is a time of "testing," it is not yet a failed test. Blending history and modern politics, outrage and glimmers of hope, Democracy Awakening is required reading for anyone wondering how, exactly, U.S. politics have come to this--and what may come next. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

“An excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history–and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.” That description from The Guardian is proven a perfect preview for Heather Cox Richardson’s recent treatise on the American condition. A historian and professor, Dr. Richardson helps us with how to preserve our unfortunately fragile current state of democracy.

This was a brilliant read that left me nodding and mmmhmming frequently. If you like history, and if you like being given the tools to apply history to everything that is happening in politics today, this is for you. I’m a lover of footnotes and research, and Richardson has a way of making sense of a puzzle so the rest of us can see the bigger picture. I’ve shared this with other friends and family who have wanted to understand the why in things --- and I’ve always been one to try and express that you have to see and understand what happened before. Richardson has a way of explaining things in a way that even the non-legal/historian scholar will understand.

Much like the other book I read by Cox Richardson, this book seemed mainly a rehash of current events with some 18th and 19th century history mixed in. This may be interesting from a historical perspective - and she is a historian - but didn't add much for me. Trump is trampling democracy. I miss the Now and Then podcast and was hoping Joanne Freeman would make a cameo. It wasn't to be.

I have read so many of Heather Cox Richardson's newsletters which correlate the past to what we've been going through for the past few years and was excited for this book, though I did have to take a media break from all things Trump-related because it was so depressing. This book brings together that easy-reading style and spirit with more history and detail. I particularly like Part Three about basic common sense and how Cox Richardson drew from our founding principles to the raft of people, especially marginalized people, who are fighting to reinvigorate the idea of what we were and what we can be. I think was both a great read and an important one and it makes me a little sad that the people who need it most might not pick it up. Big thanks to Viking/Penguin Group and NetGalley for the early access in exchange for my honest opinion.

American politics has become more unsettling these past few years. What does it mean to be American? This book opens the discussion and provides and account how the nation got to where it is today.

To be fair, I have been a long-time follower of professor Cox Richardson. I was so excited for this book and it didn't disappoint. Her writing is so linear and factual. It easily outlines the progress of politics that has pushed our country to the current status. She shows clearly that this far-right themes have been building for decades and should not be a surprise to anyone. I highly, highly recommend this book. It is well researched and easy to follow.

I've been reading Heather Cox Richardson's daily Letters from an American think-pieces for several years now. I enjoy
• that she holds on to a vision of genuine democracy that is anything but naive
• that she explains the complexities of current and historical events with precision
• that she finds meaningful connections among these current and historical events that allow me to see my own time more clearly.

Democracy Awakening offers a systematic approach to a number of issues addressed in Letters from an American: the history of (and current) anti-democratic thinking in the U.S., the shifts in Democratic and Republican stances over time, the continuing legacy of the Civil War that plays out in current events (she's a well-respected scholar of the Civil War). Most of the content here was familiar, at least in a general way because I'm familiar with her work, but I very much appreciated having it organized in a way that gave me a firm narrative understanding of the order of events and their influences on one another.

If you're at a loss to understand what is happening these days in the U.S., Richardson can help. If you're frustrated by anti-democratic politics, she can help you gird your loins and stay in the struggle. If you enjoy reading U.S. history, you'll appreciate her specificity and clarity. If you're delighted by the upsurge in anti-democratic politics in the U.S., I don't know that I can convince you to read this book—but I sure wish you would.

We've been here before. We'll be here again. The "all" in "all created equal" continues to expand and to call us to broaden our sense of who "we" are.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

This book is really slow to get started. The first 1/3 is mostly just a rehashing of US history and doesn't really delve into authoritarianism or whatever it is going to get to later. The writing is fine and engaging, but the pacing and content feels lacking. I ended up DNFing at the start of part 2.

A great and approachable book that covers America's political history.

Author, Heather Richardson, brings American politics in the house that's easy to understand (most of the time). Richardson goes over voting history, current history, and provides some reason behind the current setting of American politics.

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I would recommend this book to people who want to educate themselves on current affairs but may be shy about jumping in. Richardson's, "Democracy Awakening", is a great book to do just that-- educate people without inserting too much opinion.

Much gratitude to NetGalley, PENGUIN GROUP- Viking, and Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts.

I liked the history of the two major political parties in the US, but this book gave me retraumatizing nightmares and I also don't love anything that is so conscientiously one-sided - as though both sides of this political divide haven't done crappy things.

Heather Cox Richardson's frequent "letters" column is followed by thousands of people who want to know about history. The history of how the United States came to this point in politics and government. She is a master researcher and dare I say anthropologist in explaining the origins of many of the policies and elected officials we deal with today. She brings us back to the Founding Fathers, sometimes even prior to them, and explains in detail how each political decision has led to the next.

This book should be part of every history class in America.

What does it mean to be an American? It’s hard to come up with a better statement of American value than the words of the Declaration:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

But if we’ve learned anything in the two-and-a-half centuries since the Declaration, it’s that those very truths have been anything but self-evident to a substantial portion of our population. In her most recent book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, historian Heather Cox Richardson examines the recurring anti-democratic movements that are with us today and have been ever since our nation’s beginning.

While most Americans believe that equality before the law is our most essential principle, there have always been dissenters. The dissenters have little respect for Lincoln’s notion of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” They would rather give us government of the few, by the few, and for the few.

An early example from the book is a 19th-century statement from South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond: “I repudiate as ridiculously absurd that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.’” A more recent example comes from the 20th-century arch-conservative Paul Weyrich: “I don’t want everybody to vote. …As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

The backlash against democracy has invariably taken the form of voter suppression. Over the years, schemes have ranged from outright denial of citizenship to gerrymandering, to poll taxes, to literacy tests, to fewer polling places in poor districts, to midweek election days, and to lynchings, beatings, and scare tactics.

The character of the “few” who have asserted their right to govern regardless of the will of the governed has also varied. Sometimes it has been based on race, other times on religion, or gender, or national origin, or political leaning, or education, or property. In almost all cases, there was some degree of dishonest rationalization: It wasn’t really about voter suppression, the adherents would assure us, but about God’s will, or economic realities, or national security, or . . . almost any excuse will do.

Professor Richardson has given us a capsule history of the American experiment, written with a sharp eye for our recurrent flirtation with the different forms of government of the few. Much of what she has written is familiar: we all knew, for example, that slavery was our original sin, that Jim Crow was inherently unjust, that gerrymandering was and is a blatant abuse of power. Her unique perspective is to ascribe all these effects to a common anti-democratic impulse, and to show how persistent that impulse has been and how much damage it has inflicted on our nation.

She also describes the cyclical nature of the anti-democratic backlash, sometimes going quiet for long periods when government of the people felt strong and secure, and then coming back to try again. Our current period, she tells us, is in the midst of an anti-democratic swing. And, finally, she counters the economic argument for government of the few (the idea that a broad electorate is sure to make us economically weak) by showing that the periods when we have best achieved our egalitarian/democratic ideals were also periods of great economic strength and national unity. Since both of those are in short supply today, this new work from Heather Cox Richardson is particularly timely.

Review by Tom DeMarco
Camden, Maine

DEMOCRACY AWAKENING by Heather Cox Richardson is subtitled "Notes on the State of America" and Cox, a professor of history at Boston College, is extremely adept at sharing her insights. For example, she notes early in the text that "democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint." In fact, many of her comments are scary or disturbing as when she argues that "once people internalize their leaders' propaganda, it doesn't matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity." Cox draws numerous historical parallels and points to racial resentment as a key factor. Examples include summaries of events – some tragic – involving American patriots like Isaac Woodward, Felix Longoria, and Constance Baker Motley. It is sadly ironic that her new text is becoming widely available on a day when headlines feature news about an indicted candidate for president expressing his interest in purchasing a gun (even though it would be illegal under federal statue for someone to sell it to him). DEMOCRACY AWAKENING received a starred review from Kirkus ("show[s] her readers how history and the present are in constant conversation") and has been referenced in an array of publications, including The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post. Worth reading and revisiting.

What can I say? I read Dr. Richardson’s letter daily and she has documented the Trump era faithfully and unbiased. This is a factual and scary testament of what has happened to a party that put its faith into a “false prophet” and has truly lost its way. She doesn’t play politics - she writes about facts. There are no lies here. Read this and know what we are fighting for for democracy. Also, take note and speak up and speak out when falsehoods are sounded. Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to have an ARC of my favorite historian! Much appreciated! ❤️

History was never my favorite subject, but I enjoy the daily columns by this author enough to try her book and I am glad I did. She took history and made it interesting and relatable to what we are experiencing now.

How we got the rights we have now was shown as being hard fought with people willing to prevent some from having rights by using violence and trickery. Unfortunately, the idea that one political party would cheat to win goes back a long ways.

She showed how we got here and the likely consequences if it continues as many hope. That is depressing and maybe a good warning as it is not too late to get democracy back on track.

Thank you netgalley for an advance reader copy. Opinions expressed here are my own and given voluntarily.

In <i>Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America</i>, historian and “people’s teacher” (via her social media and newsletters) Heather Cox Richardson has created a sweeping connect-the-dots history of how we got to where we are now. Where we are now—grappling between remaining a democracy or becoming an authoritarian country—has long roots, and in Parts 1 and 2, she starts at the beginning of American history and follows those roots into global history (mostly chronologically, but when she backtracks—specifically tracing the Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, back to its historical beginning—it is organic and easy to follow). Once we advance into the events of the last few years, people who follow the news will already be fully informed, but this is a book that will stand as a valuable history for future readers, so it is great to have all this documented in story form.

I cannot possibly reduce this work (or even retain as much as I’d like—this is a book to read multiple times), so suffice it to say: it is readable, fast, understandable, and rather than throwing in absolutely every detail as a lot of historians do, she opts to tell a specific American story efficiently: the story of American democracy—a belief that all people should have equal rights and have a government by their consent.

Because I’m interested in <i>why</i> people are so vulnerable to manipulation, power-greediness, and a herd-like compulsion to move with others even when doing so makes no sense and undermines democracy, I was particularly struck the very first time I read about a nonsense statement that split people into warring cultures:
<blockquote>[In 1971] Phyllis Schlafly said: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society. Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career. . . .” (pg. # NA)</blockquote>
This kind of statement, assuming that if anybody gets something (or said another way, if everybody gets equal rights), somebody else must lose something, is key to Movement Conservatism (creating rifts between oneself and others who are deemed “bad”) that Cox traces back to 1937. And it is key to the intentional attempt to destroy civil society, establish chaos—which most people will do anything to stop—and thereby lay the foundation for people’s desire for a “strong man” to make it stop, evoking authoritarianism and extinguishing democracy.

You could plug into this kind of “<i>this</i> causes <i>that</i> hurt/loss” statement any number of things: true history that includes our racist roots; the right to decide what we do with our bodies; climate change causes; etc. This critical false equivalence (lie), I believe, can only be combatted if people decide to <i>think</i>—use common sense—rather than react in fear of chaos. And common sense is a real possibility: In Part 3 of this book, Cox writes about how powerful common sense was in moving us to independence: Thomas Paine’s pamphlet <i>Common Sense</i> rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others and called “ridiculous” the notion that an island should rule a continent. “Paine’s spark set to flame more than a decade of accumulating timber,” writes Cox, leading to declarations of independence. The real revolution Americans experienced was in thinking rather than fighting.

Here’s my common sense: It is absolute nonsense that women having equal pay and rights could hurt marriages. How? Women who want to be homemakers will not be forced to work. Teaching true history will not hurt white people; I and most white people I know will grapple with questions about our own commitment to what’s right and would we have been strong enough to act as an abolitionist? I don’t know anybody who identifies with slave-holders. If somebody does not want to accept equality and history of inequality, they don’t have to, but true history can still be taught in schools. If somebody doesn’t support the right to body autonomy for themselves, they don’t have to; nobody will ever force them to have an abortion and if they don’t want to make their own medical decisions, they can find some authority to hand responsibility over to. If somebody does not accept that our actions are destroying the earth, they are free to believe that. Yes, pollution regulation will change lives, but I wager that anybody who wants to pollute their home will still be able to do so. Nobody will have to love people they don’t love if others have the right to love who they love. You don’t have to believe what you don’t believe.

There is no loss for anybody if more people do better by telling the truth and having equal rights. The whole notion of consequent loss is nuts!

And it is on this belief in false equivalencies that this book’s history relies. As Cox writes about Trump’s attack on the Mueller investigation: “if he could get Americans to reject the truth and accept his lies about what had happened, they would be psychologically committed to him.” And this commitment has been expertly cultivated by a string of calculated lies, starting with something as seemingly stupid as inauguration crowd size, all the way up to saying a coup where people were killed and terrorized didn’t happen and insisting an election was stolen in the face of 60 courts and a Republican Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States Department of Homeland Security declaring there was no election fraud.

During Trump’s impeachment hearings over obstruction of justice and using the power of the presidency to try to steal an election, the Republicans used their majority to acquit, but Cox writes, “. . . the forty-eight senators who voted to convict Trump represented eighteen million more Americans than the fifty-two Republicans who voted to acquit. It was increasingly obvious that a minority was gaming the system against the majority and that their only hope of retaining power was to repress that majority. (pg. # NA)”

This is where we are. But Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t leave us there.

Part 3: Reclaiming America begins with a rousing question about whether equality and government by consent is even possible, and ends with a fanfare of all the marginalized individuals who believe in and fight for a more perfect union. It is community, she points out, that is the real backbone of this country: rather than lone cowboys riding the range, it was the barn-raising communities and everybody working together to make life possible. “Working together, across racial lines, ethnic lines, gender lines, and age lines, was what enabled people to defend their rights against a small group of elites determined to keep control of the country. (p. # NA)” This feels like an infusion of oxygen after the dire history in the first half of the book. And I welcomed beginning American history anew in this section, including not only white male founders, but everyone who was here, enumerating their accomplishments and participation in education and innovation, and above all, making vivid their fervid belief that with hard work, they could have the American dream—a belief that was and remains steadfast, despite the concurrent history of denial of their equal rights.

Now is not the first time our democracy has been in a fight for its life. In 1863, Cox writes, “. . . Americans had woken up. They realized that the very nature of America was under attack. They were divided among themselves [over slavery] and at first they didn’t really know how to fight back, but ordinary people quickly came to pitch in however they could. . . . Once awake, they found the strength of their majority. (p. #NA)”

I believe most of us want a democracy. I believe we are a huge majority—as proved by the 7 million more voters who voted to preserve it rather than support an autocrat in the last election. All that is required to preserve democracy is for the majority to wake up, use common sense, and refuse to mindlessly allow our freedom to be stolen by those who wish to divide us into warring factions based on bogus zero-sum concepts. Heather Cox Richardson has certainly done her part to sound an alarm clock.

If you're a fan of her daily pieces, you'll be pleased with this book. Great insight and thought provoking material.
Highly recommend!

An outstanding account of how the USA got to the politics which grip our nation today. The author is both an excellent historian and a great writer. This book explains so much of the gridlock in our politics.