Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Popular history is a genre of history book aimed at the common reader. Academic history books appeal to experts and include specific details, theories, and interpretations that rely on the reader’s already having a base of knowledge in the subject. Popular history texts, on the other hand, teach readers the terminology they need to understand its key concepts. Richardson, for instance, uses narrative examples and explanation to teach readers the definition and context of phrases like “liberal consensus,” “authoritarianism,” and “Movement Conservatism,” without assuming her readers already know what these terms mean.

Popular history also uses a narrative style to appeal to readers, presenting history as an interwoven narrative story rather than a series of dates and events. This style more closely approximates the way people organically tell stories. People organize their individual experiences into themes, make connections between past and present experiences, and relate their experiences to others. Richardson’s book adopts this storytelling tactic. Rather than chronicling American democracy from its roots in the Revolutionary era to the present, she begins in the early 20th century, covering the last hundred years of United States history to define the recent history of the terms “liberalism” and “conservatism,” occasionally dipping back further in time to the Civil War era to contextualize its effect on the development of these concepts. Part 2 then discusses the Trump presidency, which Richardson sees as a testing ground for the rising authoritarianism she set up in Part 1. Her final chapter dips back to the United States’ founding to examine the ideas of independence and equality in the nation and how they have been unequally applied throughout United States history but persevered nonetheless. This non-sequential structure allows Richardson to craft a narrative of the nature of democracy and authoritarianism in the United States, in which the present is deeply affected by the past.

Popular history draws criticism for two key reasons. The first is that it is sometimes less cited and researched than academic history. While this is sometimes true, like many books and internet resources, the reliability of popular history often depends on the personal research, expertise, and citational ethics of its author. Richardson is an academic trained extensively in the areas she discusses in the book. She has been involved in many public-facing historical education endeavors. Further, she provides an extensive works cited and index.

The second criticism of popular history concerns the debate about how access to and knowledge of their country’s historical actions affect people’s views of their country. Critics of making history more widely accessible via popular history debate “whether the purpose of learning about that history was to make students more patriotic about, or more critical of, their nation’s past” (Witham, Nick. “Howard Zinn and the Politics of Popular History.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2023). Historical narratives that account for negative aspects of American history, such as enslavement and oppression, occasionally draw ire and “hyperbolic conservative opposition from activists, journalists, and politicians, as well as more measured but nonetheless significant pushback from within the historical profession” (Witham), on the grounds that this history is antithetical to patriotism. Richardson’s book addresses this phenomenon directly and extensively in her discussion of The Use of False History to Manipulate Ideology. One well-known example she cites is the backlash against Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, which Donald Trump called a “radicalized” history that taught “lies” and which he attempted to counteract with his 1776 Project. In this way, while Richardson never comments directly on the debate about the popular history genre, the themes of her book make a case for the genre’s value.