Democracy Awakening

A conversation with historian and boss Substacker Heather Cox Richardson

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On Monday evening, October 30, 2023, I had the pleasure of joining Heather Cox Richardson in an online evening event to discuss her new book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Penguin/Random House, 2023). Richardson is one of the most popular and well-known historians working today, and since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, has taken it up as her mission to promote fact-based conversations about the state of our democracy. You can read an interview with Richardson here.

At 1.2 million subscribers, Richardson’s newsletter, Letters From An American  is consistently at the top of the Substack rankings, with more readers than Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald (yay, on all counts.) Many of us who are her colleagues talk about why Richardson is so beloved, and here is what we think: she is generous, approachable, and offers smart talk about history and politics in language everyone can understand. As one friend of mine said, “I get up in the morning, and when I read Letters From An American, I feel satisfied that I have the information I need about what is happening now.”

But Richardson is also writing the first draft of our present history, making connections to the past that help even the ost seasoned reader think productively about the American story—where the nation went wrong, where we did well, and how our forebears understood problems similar to those we face today. Her project? Using history to strengthen our democracy so that we can stop the illiberalism represented by the MAGA movement and the extremist forces that currently control the Republican party in their tracks in 2024.

Some of you already saw this event, but for those who didn’t, it’s only an hour—and you can listen on your phone as if it were a podcast. Enjoy!