Born in Chicago in 1962, Heather Cox Richardson was raised in the small town of Yarmouth, Maine. She attended boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive prep school in New Hampshire, where she found an exciting academic community. This influenced her decision to pursue a career as a public intellectual, a goal she believed would be impossible to achieve while living in Maine. After Exeter, Richardson completed her bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and PhD at Harvard. She taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst before arriving in her current position as a history professor at Boston College.

Richardson’s books prior to Democracy Awakening focus on 19th-century U.S. history and politics as they study the Civil War, Reconstruction, Westward Expansion, the Gilded Age, and the trajectory of democracy throughout American history. Her first book, The Greatest Nation on Earth (1997), examines the ideology of the Republican Party before and during the Civil War. She followed up with The Death of Reconstruction (2001), which continues the study of Republican Party ideology into the Reconstruction period of the late 1860s and 1870s and the Gilded Age of the 1880s. It differs from earlier studies of those decades by focusing on how considerations of social class impacted the era’s politics and policies.

Richardson’s next book, West from Appomattox (2007), is an examination of the turbulent years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of the 19th century. It describes how the role of government intervention (and the principles of the Republican Party) shifted significantly during the period from a focus on promoting good to citizens overall to mostly benefiting white wealthy and middle-class Americans. It discusses the American West far more than examinations of the period typically have, and it also considers how the shift in governmental priorities negatively impacted African Americans, laborers, immigrants, and Native Americans. In Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010) Richardson describes how Native Americans were the victims of brutal politically motivated acts perpetuated by a Republican President, Benjamin Harrison, in 1890.

Richardson’s topic in To Make Men Free (2014) is the history of the Republican Party from its founding in 1854 through George W. Bush’s presidency during the first decade of the 21st century. It describes the numerous changes and vicissitudes that occurred within the part over the course of the over 150 years that it examines. Immediately prior to Democracy Awakening, Richardson published the provocatively titled How the South Won the Civil War (2020). The scope of that book, whose subtitle is Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, is the breadth of American history, not just the years surrounding the Civil War. Its themes—including the ephemeral nature of democracy’s triumphs and the rise of Movement Conservatism—will be familiar to readers of Democracy Awakening.

Richardson defines her own political identity as “Lincoln Republican,” meaning she shares the political values of the party at the time of Abraham Lincoln—specifically, the fact that under Lincoln and the Republican party of his period, the federal government used its expanded power to improve the lives of all citizens. Her work traces the history of the Republican party from its pre-Civil War roots through the 21st century, arguing that the party has lost sight of its founding ideals. Throughout her career, Richardson has balanced deep intellectual inquiry with an engagement with the political ideas and passions of non-academic people, which she credits in part to her rural upbringing. As she told The Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, “I’m from a very small town with very poor people in it. I’ve always had a foot in both camps, and a foot in neither in a way.”

Richardson found an audience outside of academic circles in 2019, when she began writing daily posts on her Facebook page in response to the first impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. Her straightforward writing style makes complex political events accessible to a wide range of readers, and her summaries placing contemporary political events in a historical context have become wildly popular. Richardson continues to share her ideas in her highly successful newsletter published through Substack, Letters from an American, and in two podcasts.

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