Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Heather Cox Richardson is an American academic and professional historian. She earned her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard and is a professor of history at Boston College. Her expertise includes a wide variety of political and cultural aspects of the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as well as the ideological shifts within political parties during this time. Though Richardson’s published books largely focus on these eras, after the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019, Richardson began writing public-facing thoughts on the impeachment in a Substack newsletter titled Letters from an American. Richardson’s accessible tone and streamlined, clear explanations of current and historical events have made her newsletter extremely popular; with 1.3 million subscribers, it is one of the largest and most successful publications on Substack.

One of the express goals of Richardson’s newsletter is to help readers “get a grip on today’s politics” by thinking about “America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs” in the country’s history (Richardson, Heather Cox. “About Letters from an American.” Letters from an American). From 2021 to 2023, Richardson also co-hosted a history podcast called Now & Then with fellow historian Joanne Freeman, who specializes in the Revolutionary Era and pre–Civil War American history.