Book Review: Democracy Awakening

Here’s my book review for Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson. Don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve read it too. And check out today’s writing prompt at the bottom of this post.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson packs a lot of history and historical context into less than three hundred pages. But luckily, it’s as engaging and eye-opening as it is easy to read. While there are a lot of dates and names and pieces of legislation to remember, you’ll never feel like you’re reading a textbook, although you will still learn a lot as if you were reading one. Even those of us who think we know everything there is to know about U.S. history will pick up an interesting nugget or two as they read this book. 

If you were looking for a book to explain the history of the two major political parties in the U.S. (Democrats and Republicans) and how they evolved over the centuries, this is it. Cox Richardson details the historical evolution of both parties over the course of U.S. history, starting with how they were formed before the U.S. was even officially a country. In addition, she discusses how the concepts of democracy and liberty have evolved for various groups within the U.S. since the Revolutionary War. And she unpacks how the U.S. came to encroach on its current ‘authoritarian experiment’, and claims that we need to end such an experiment and reclaim and reawaken democracy and the democratic ideals on which the U.S. was founded. 

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to those who are interested in reading more about how we got to where we are today in the U.S., as far as political divisiveness is concerned. And I would recommend it to those who want a quick refresher course on U.S. political history. In those realms, this book is excellent. 

While this book was informative, well researched, and well organized, I felt that it never really addressed what to do with the knowledge of history that was so painstakingly laid out, other than to recognize and remember that democracy should be constantly evolving (?). Still, I was really hoping that the last third of the book would dive deeper into how democracy is awakening now, or how people can and should awaken democracy now. Perhaps that isn’t fair to say, but I felt like that’s what I was led to expect when I originally picked up the book. Nonetheless, this book is still very much worth the read!

Here is a notable quote from the book: “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” (p.xi)

Additional note: the audio version I came across had an additional Afterword that includes notable events from 2023 and 2024. 

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Today’s Writing Prompt