Heather Cox Richardson is a well-regarded American historian of the 19th century, currently teaching at Boston College and best known for her Letters from an American Substack newsletter and book Democracy Awakening (2023).
Richardson was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1962 and spent most of her childhood in Maine. She was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, the latter institution awarding her a AB, MA, and PhD. Her most notable works are The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997); The Death of Reconstruction (2001); West from Appomattox (2007); Wounded Knee (2010); To Make Men Free (2014); How the South Won the Civil War (2020); and Democracy Awakening.
She has received numerous honors and accolades for her research and publications. She was on the Forbes "50 Over 50" list in 2021; was one of USA Today’s Women of the Year in 2022; won the Authors Guild Foundation’s Baldacci Award for Literary Activism in 2024; and won the Kidger Award by the New England History Teachers Association at the NCSS Conference.
She is not a member of either political party. She lives with her second husband, Buddy Poland, a lobsterman, in Maine.
Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America was published in 2023. It was a New York Times bestseller and was reviewed favorably.
The origins of the book lie in Richardson’s desire to answer questions that people...
