Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
By Heather Cox Richardson (Author)
New York Times Bestseller
“Engaging and highly accessible.”—Boston Globe
“A vibrant, and essential history of America’s unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals… It’s both a cause for hope, and a call to arms.”–Jane Mayer, author Dark Money
From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy — and how we can turn back.
In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.
In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.
Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”
Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.
Democracy Awakening review: Heather Cox Richardson's necessary US history
The Boston College professor offers a valuable primer on Republican extremism – but also progressive achievement
In a media landscape so polluted by politicians addicted to cheap thrills (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Orange Monster) and the pundits addicted to them (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon), the success of Heather Cox Richardson is much more than a blast of fresh air. It’s a bona fide miracle.
The Boston College history professor started writing her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost four years ago. Today her daily dose of common sense about the day’s news, wrapped in an elegant package of American history, has a remarkable 1.2 million subscribers, making her the most popular writer on Substack. Not since Edward P Morgan captivated the liberal elite with his nightly 15-minute broadcasts in the 1960s has one pundit been so important to so many progressive Americans at once.
In the age of social media, Richardson’s success is counterintuitive. When she was profiled by Ben Smith in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Smith confessed he was so addicted to Twitter he rarely found the time to open her “rich summaries” of the news. When he told Bill Moyers, one of Richardson’s earliest promoters, the same thing, the great commentator explained: “You live in a world of thunderstorms, and she watches the waves come in.”
Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is 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.
Like other recent books, including The Destructionists by Dana Milbank, Richardson’s new volume reminds us that far from being an outlier, Donald Trump was inevitable after 70 years of Republican pandering to big business, racism and Christian nationalism.
Heather Cox Richardson interviews Joe Biden in 2022.
So many direct lines can be drawn from the dawn of modern conservatism to the insanity of the Freedom Caucus today. It was William F Buckley Jr, the most famous conservative pundit of his era, who in 1951 attacked universities for teaching “secularism and collectivism” and promoted the canard that liberals were basically communists. Among Buckley’s mortal enemies, Richardson writes, were everyone “who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure and protect civil rights” – and who “believed in fact-based argument”.
In place of the liberal consensus that emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Buckley and his henchmen wanted a new “orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets”. A few years later, the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Four years after that, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy included promises to slow down the desegregation the supreme court had ordered 14 years before.
In one of the most notorious dog whistles of all time, Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by declaring his love for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi – made infamous by the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.
Since the 1950s, Richardson writes, conservatives have fought to destroy “the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians [have] hacked away at it” but still “left much of the government intact”. With Trump’s election in 2016, the nation had finally “put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it”. Republicans fought for 50 years for an “end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required”. Trump went even further by “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism”.
Richardson is refreshingly direct about the importance of the fascist example to Trump and his Maga movement. When he used the White House to host the Republican convention in 2020, the first lady, Melania Trump, wore a “dress that evoked a Nazi uniform”. And, Richardson writes, the big lie was a “key propaganda tool” for the Nazis, which Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf, the book Trump may have kept on his night table at Trump Tower (or maybe it was a collection of Hitler’s speeches).
Lyndon B Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965, at the US Capitol in Washington.
Richardson even uses the psychological profile of Hitler by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency during the second world war, to remind us of similarities to Trump. The OSS said Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy … never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong”.
But Richardson’s book isn’t just a recitation of the evil of Republicans. It is also a celebration of progressive successes. She reminds us that before Vietnam ruined his presidency, Lyndon Johnson compiled an incredible record. In one session, Congress passed an astonishing 84 laws. Johnson’s “Great Society” included the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal aid for public schools; launched Head Start for the early education of low-income children; the social security amendments that created Medicare; increased welfare payments; rent subsidies; the Water Quality Act of 1965; and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
These laws had a measurable impact. “Forty million Americans were poor in 1960”; by 1969, that had dropped to 24 million.
Addressing graduates of the University of Michigan in 1964, Johnson used words that are apt today:“For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to … lead America toward a new age … You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”
Johnson rejected the “timid souls” who believed “we are condemned to a soulless wealth. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
'An end of American democracy': Heather Cox Richardson on Trump's historic threat
Kevin Seefried did what the rebel army never could. On 6 January 2021, the 53-year-old carried a Confederate flag through the US Capitol. For historians of the American civil war such as Heather Cox Richardson, it was like a blow to the solar plexus.
“The whole point of a civil war was to make sure that battle flag never had influence in the United States Capitol,” she says, via Zoom from near Augusta, Maine. “With a loss of almost $6bn and 600,000 lives, they kept that flag out of the Capitol, and then, I’m sorry, but those fuckers brought it in. I saw that, and the gut-punch was larger than any other moment in history, for me as a historian who has lived that civil war as deeply as I have.”
Richardson, 60, a history professor at Boston College, has been described by the New York Times as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has 1.7 million followers on Facebook while her bio on X, formerly known as Twitter, says: “Historian. Author. Professor. Budding Curmudgeon. I study the contrast between image and reality in America, especially in politics.”
Readers welcome Richardson’s ability, like Ken Burns, Rachel Maddow and Jon Meacham, to make sense of Trump-era chaos by assuring us we have been here before and survived. She is the cohost of Now & Then, a Vox Media podcast, and author of award-winning books about the civil war, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the American west.
Now she offers Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism with an assist from Donald Trump. She seems relieved it’s done.
“Writing 1,200 words every day is itself a chore and then to write a book on top of it damn near killed me,” Richardson admits. “The reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the southern strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”
Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.
She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.
“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.
A Confederate flag flies outside the Senate chamber on January 6. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.
Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it because the Republicans decide it’s better to fight FDR from the outside than try and work with Democrats, and Democrats don’t want to be criticising their own president. They all disavow it but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.
“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”
These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.
“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”
Enter Trump, a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own.
Richardson says: “The establishment Republicans played the issue of abortion, played the issue of ‘the Democrats are evil’ to stay in power and enact what was essentially a libertarian destruction of the federal government that had been in place since 1933. But I don’t think that they intended to give up their power. Trump took one look at that and said, ‘I’m going to bypass you and go right around this.’ He could do that because he was such a good salesman and he put in place something very different.
“Trump is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population, one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.
“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.
“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”
Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives.
Trump’s rise could be described as a triumph of the will. Republican politicians offered little defence.
“If there is one group that infuriates me in all of this, it is the senators,” Richardson says. “The Republican senators could have stopped Trump at any moment and they liked the tax cuts and then they became frightened of his followers. They should have stopped him in 2015, in 2016, in 2017, and they can stop him now and they won’t. I’m so tired of hearing these people saying, ‘Well, we knew he was bad.’ Thank you for that!”
Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary. Polls show him neck-and-neck with Biden. It is looking like a close-run thing. What would a second Trump term mean for America?
“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.
“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases. As long as somebody gets hurt, that’s enough for them.”
Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, Arizona, he issued another stark warning. The president’s approval rating is anaemic and some Democrats are restless but Richardson casts a historian’s eye on his record.
Joe Biden and Heather Cox Richardson talk in the China Room of the White House, in February 2022. Photograph: World Politics Archive (WPA)/Alamy
“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs, which I tended to denigrate.
“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, for all that it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election and the Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle that so long as it means they can regain power here. His foreign affairs understanding has been been key.
“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that Trump could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.
“That has been huge but the whole argument behind all that has been he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.
“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months.”
Biden, who turns 81 next month, is also the oldest president. Surveys show many Democrats think he is too old. Richardson is not buying.
“He’s older than dirt; they all are. But age is actually a benefit for him. First of all it’s non-threatening to a lot of older white people, and second of all he does have those connections that you just simply don’t have if you’re 40.
“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”
Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day. On Wednesday, her Substack column was devoted to the ousting of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, after years of not being able to tell what is real, to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting.
“Maybe that’s just me because when I write I don’t know the answers myself every morning. But when I want to know, for example, what happened in the committee, I actually do the research and say this is what happened so that I can sleep at night feeling like my feet are under me.
“So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”
Black Friday shopping: US President Joe Biden buys a book
Nov 25, 2023,
The traditional "Black Friday" shopping event marked the beginning of the holiday shopping season in the United States, with retailers offering significant discounts to attract customers. This year's event, taking place amid economic uncertainties, saw stores providing even deeper discounts to draw in consumers who have been dealing with persistent inflation and the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Black Friday, shoppers who headed to malls and stores were greeted with a variety of incentives ranging from champagne to virtual reality experiences and traditional doorbuster deals.
These efforts by retailers were aimed at attracting customers who are increasingly cautious about unnecessary spending and impulse purchases this year.
With dwindling savings and rising credit card debts, consumers are feeling the pinch. Despite a slight ease in inflation, the cost of various items, including essentials like meat and housing, remains significantly higher compared to three years ago.
Following "Black Friday," the retail industry is also gearing up for "Cyber Monday," another major sales event aimed at online shoppers.
US President Biden also engaged in Black Friday shopping in Nantucket amidst global attention on the release of hostages by Hamas during a four-day truce in the Gaza Strip. The President, accompanied by his son Hunter Biden, visited a bookstore, adhering to a family tradition. He remarked, “Can’t come without going to the bookstore. We’ve got a tradition.”
Before his shopping spree, Biden addressed the nation about the hostage crisis, expressing uncertainty about the release of up to nine American citizens taken hostage in the October 7 attacks in southern Israel. “We don’t know when that will occur… It is my hope and expectation it will be soon,” Biden said.
Hamas has committed to freeing an additional 26 hostages, totaling 50 out of approximately 240, over the next three days, though the identities of these individuals remain unknown.
According to a report in New York post, Hunter Biden, facing federal gun charges in Delaware and potential tax charges in Los Angeles, joined his father for shopping after dining at the Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant. The Bidens are staying at the home of billionaire David Rubenstein during their vacation.
While shopping, President Biden purchased the book “Democracy Awakening” by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The First Lady, Jill Biden, mentioned to reporters that the family was enjoying their time.
Richardson has authored seven books on history and politics. In 2014, she founded a popular history website, werehistory.org. Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On.[3] More recently, Richardson started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history.[4] The newsletter accrued over one million subscribers, making her, as of December 2020, the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack.[5] Richardson also co-hosts the podcast Now & Then with fellow historian Joanne B. Freeman.[6] In February 2022, Richardson interviewed U.S. President Joe Biden.
Richardson’s first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997), stemmed from her dissertation at Harvard University. Inspired by Eric Foner’s work on pre-Civil War Republican ideology, Richardson analyzed Republican economic policies during the war. She contended that their efforts to create an activist federal government during the Civil War marked a continuation of Republican free labor ideology. These policies, such as war bonds and greenbacks or the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act, revolutionized the role of the federal government in the U.S. economy. At the same time, these actions laid the groundwork for the Republican Party's shift to big business after the Civil War.[10]
According to Professor James L. Huston at Oklahoma State University:
For nineteenth-century political historians, this will be an important book with crucial insights into the nature of the Republican Party. Richardson's attention to political economy offers a refreshing vantage point from which to assess Civil War legislation, and her willingness to delve deeply into economic doctrines is commendable. Not the least of her accomplishments is a more realistic appraisal of the Republicans, revealing their agricultural bias and their distrust of monopoly and hierarchy.... At times, Richardson's discussion of economic principles is insightful and perceptive; at other times the discussion is shallow and requires more refinement.[11]
Four years later, Richardson extended her study of Republican policy into the postwar period with The Death of Reconstruction (2001).[12] Unlike other historians, she focused her analysis of the period on the "Northern abandonment of Reconstruction". Building on the earlier work of C. Vann Woodward, she argued that a more complete understanding of the period required appreciation of class, not only race. As Reconstruction continued into the 1870s and especially the 1880s, Republicans began to view African Americans in the South more from a class perspective and less from the perspective of race that had driven their earlier humanitarianism. In the midst of the labor struggles of the Gilded Age, Republicans came to compare "the demands of the ex-slaves for land, social services, and civil rights" to the demands of white laborers in the North. This ideological shift was the key to Republican abandonment of Reconstruction, as they chose the protection of their economic and business interests over their desire for racial equality.
According to Professor Michael W. Fitzgerald, at St. Olaf College:
"The Death of Reconstruction" is an important book on a big topic. It offers a full-scale reinterpretation of the great betrayal of the Civil War's egalitarian legacy, the northern public's abandonment of the freedpeople. If the book is not uniformly persuasive, that partially reflects the scope of its ambition.[13]
In West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007), Richardson presented Reconstruction as a national event that affected all Americans, not just those in the South.[8] She incorporated the West into the discussion of Reconstruction as no predecessor had. Between 1865 and 1900, Americans re-imagined the role of the federal government, calling upon it to promote the well-being of its citizens. However, racism, sexism, and greed divided Americans, and the same people who increasingly benefited from government intervention—white, middle-class Americans—actively excluded African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and organized laborers from the newfound bounties of their reconstructed nation.[14]
Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010), focused on the U.S. Army's slaughter of Native Americans in South Dakota in 1890.[15] She argued that party politics and opportunism led to the Wounded Knee Massacre. After a bruising midterm election, President Benjamin Harrison needed to shore up his support. To do so, he turned to The Dakotas, where he replaced seasoned Indian agents with unqualified political allies, who incorrectly assumed that the Ghost Dance Movement presaged war. In order to avoid spending cuts from Congress, the army responded by sending one-third of its force. After the event, Republicans tried to paint the massacre as a heroic battle to stifle the resurgent Democrats.
In To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014), Richardson extended her study of the Republican Party into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[16] This book studied the entire life of the Republican Party, from its inception in the 1850s through the presidency of George W. Bush.[17] Believing a small group of men who controlled all three branches of government were turning the country into a slavocracy, the party’s founders united against "slave power". These Republicans articulated a new vision of an America in which all hardworking men could rise. But after the Civil War, Republicans began to emulate what they originally opposed. They tied themselves to powerful bankers and industrialists, sacrificing the well-being of ordinary Americans. A similar process took place after World War II, when Republicans sought to dismantle successful New Deal policies and prop up the wealthy. However, in both cases, reformers within the party were able to return the party to its founding vision of equality of opportunity, first Theodore Roosevelt during the Progressive Era, and then Dwight D. Eisenhower, who enforced integration and maintained the New Deal.
The Nixon and Reagan administrations represented yet another fall from the party's founding purpose. It is ironic, Richardson points out, that Republicans treated Barack Obama with an unprecedented level of disrespect, as Obama's rise from humble beginnings to the highest office in the nation embodied the vision of the original Republicans. In a new afterword, Richardson also points out the irony of one of the rioters storming the Capitol carrying the Confederate flag on January 6, 2021, despite the Republican Party starting in the 1850s as a popular movement against the men who would lead the Confederate States of America.
In September 2019, Richardson began writing a daily synopsis of political events associated with the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Originally posting late every evening or in the early hours of the next day on her Facebook page, Richardson later moved to add a newsletter format, entitled "Letters from an American", published via Substack.[4] The newsletter deals with contemporary events she explicates and relates to historical developments.
The newsletter became popular because of her calm voice, with straightforward explanations of the news of the day. As of December 2020, Richardson was "the most successful individual author of a paid publication on... Substack" and on track to bring in a million dollars of revenue a year.[5] The newsletter received a "Best of Boston" award for "2021 Best Pandemic Newsletter" from Boston magazine.[18]
In How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020), Richardson argued that America was founded with contradicting ideals, with the ideas of liberty, equality, and opportunity on one hand, and slavery and hierarchy on the other. United States victory in the American Civil War should have settled that tension forever, but at the same time that the Civil War was fought, Americans also started moving into the West. In the West, Americans found, and expanded upon, deep racial hierarchies, meaning that hierarchical values survived in American politics and culture despite the crushing defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy. Those traditions—a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color—have found a home in modern conservative politics, leaving the promise of America unfulfilled. Professor Dana Elizabeth Weiner of Wilfrid Laurier University states:
With this beautifully written book, prominent US historian Heather Cox Richardson offers valuable insights to historians and general readers about the tenacity of oligarchy in American politics since the seventeenth century.[19]
Deborah M. Liles, a professor at Tarleton State University states:
Heather Cox Richardson's skill with connecting events into a cohesive narrative is on full display in this brilliant study....she dismantles the concept of equality guaranteed in the Constitution, connects western ideology with that of the Old South, and demonstrates how oligarchs and those who supported them established restrictions within society to retain their power.[20]
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)[edit]
In 2023, Richardson published her seventh book, entitled Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America that she characterized as having grown from writings she began in 2019 and subsequent interactions with her readers.[21] Those writings deal with discussion of contemporary events Richardson relates to historical developments and that were moved from postings on Facebook to her newsletter entitled "Letters from an American" and published, almost daily, on Substack.
The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997) ISBN978-0-674-36213-0
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Harvard University Press, 2001) ISBN978-0-674-01366-7
"A Marshall Plan for the South?: The Failure of Republican and Democratic Ideology during Reconstruction." Civil War History 51.4 (2005): 378-387. online
West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2007) ISBN978-0-300-13630-2
"Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Principle." Marquette Law Review 93 (2009): 1383+ online.
Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic Books, 2010) ISBN978-1-4587-6014-2
To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2014) ISBN978-0-465-02431-5
How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020) ISBN978-0-19-090091-5
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking, 2023) ISBN978-0-593-65296-1
Heather Cox Richardson interviews Joe Biden in 2022. 
A Confederate flag flies outside the Senate chamber on January 6. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
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