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 asked her every day, mostly in response to her popular Substack, Letters from an American. She told an interviewer, “I wrote a draft with the 30 chapters and put it aside for a few months. When I picked it back up, it seemed to me to be making an argument that I had not seen when I wrote it. That was the whole theoretical argument in it about the rise of authoritarianism in a democracy, focusing on the tools that authoritarians use. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it, and I basically rewrote about 80 percent of the book to make that argument. I felt with this book like I sort of turned it loose and all the chapters talked to each other and came up with their own vision of what the book should be. It’s not a book I set out to write. I was part of bringing it to life, but it feels a little bit like it’s taken on a life of its own, which I think is kinda cool.”
Richardson initially planned to call the book All I Know, but decided that was too basic and cheesy and settled on the Democracy Awakening title because it derived from a Walt Whitman quote: “Democracy…is a word the real gist of which sleeps, quite unawaken’d.” Its subtitle is derived from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.
It was one of the Washington Post‘s “50 Best NonFiction Books of 2023” and Kirkus Review’s ”2023 Best NonFiction Books of the Year.” Reviews were generally positive. For example, the Guardian said it was “Necessary U.S. history ... 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,” the Washington Post called it “the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard. It’s magisterial.”
