The Garamond Agency

Lisa

Democracy Awakening

New York Times Bestseller

National Bestseller

From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter Letters from an American, a vital narrative that explains how America, once  a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy — and how we can turn back.

In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. The essays soon turned into a newsletter and, spread by word of mouth, its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on its plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.

In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Richardson’s unique talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the historical roots and precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. Writing in her trademark calm prose, she manages to be both realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Richardson’s easy command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”

There are many books that tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.

Written by

Going Around

Across seven decades as a working reporter and over 10,000 columns filed, journalist Murray Kempton’s approach, from the ‘50s to his death in 1997, was always the same: stick up for the people and do so with uncommon style and grace. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, he reported for the New York Post, the New Republic, Newsday, and the New York Review of Books – among other publications – and was credited, by David Halberstam, for pioneering the genre of New Journalism.

Kempton elevated the art of reporting as both a stylist and a moralist, matching his attentiveness to wit and irony with what one critic called “a compassion that is sometimes unruly.” The scion of an aristocratic Southern family who rejected his staid upbringing to become a radical socialist, he was an eloquent defender of American communists during the McCarthy era and one of the first white reporters to make the Civil Rights Movement into a beat. And he was an indelible New York character, traveling across Manhattan by bike, even as an old man, a Walkman around his neck.

Going Around: Selected Writings of Murray Kempton is the first collection of Kempton’s writing to appear in over a quarter-century. In collecting these pieces, historian Andrew Holter, with the collaboration of Kempton’s estate and the family of Barbara Epstein, his longtime companion, blows the dust off an illustrious body of work. The book puts one of the most revered, if too long unsung, American nonfiction writers of the 20th century into conversation with controversies of the 21st that he anticipated. These include the ascendancy of Donald Trump, whom Kempton took seriously in the 1980s; the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement; the disappearance of daily newspapers; and the crises of homelessness and mass incarceration.

Especially among reporters themselves, Kempton’s name is invoked with the kind of reverence reserved not merely for a master of the craft but for one of the profession’s virtuoso stylists and a paragon of journalistic integrity.

Written by

Radical Acts of Justice

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, community bail funds surged, as a form of protest and a focus of philanthropic energy. While they were hardly new, bail funds garnered attention as an effective and individual means of responding to the failures of the police and the courts and a way to channel outrage in a pandemic era. And these funds have made a difference – after months of uprisings, thousands of protesters and ordinary people were freed from jail as millions of dollars were donated to bail funds nationwide.

In Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration, Jocelyn Simonson, who has written extensively about the ways that social movements shift our views of justice, looks at bail funds and other ground-up actions that are, one by one, effecting social change and contesting preconceived notions about freedom and safety. She explores the problematic idea that individuals who are prosecuted are not the people who matter when it comes to politics. Actions like bail funds, courtwatching, and people’s budgets give agency to these individuals and their families and loved ones, and force us to recognize the deep forms of violence in each and every corner of the carceral state.

By focusing on the reforms that shift power to the people who are most directly affected by the system, Radical Acts of Justice proposes that communal resistance within the system is a form of justice-making itself. The stories of grassroots activism that Jocelyn Simonson follows are a reminder of the power, and unpredictability, of planting many seeds. These forms of resistance open up transformational possibilities that would otherwise elude us and that can lead to change that is both urgent and necessary.

Written by

The Injustice of Place

Three of the nation’s top researchers known for taking on key mysteries about poverty deliver a new, multi-dimensional way of measuring deep disadvantage in every county in the nation as well as in its 500 most-populated cities. By turning the lens of disadvantage from the individual to the community, the authors uncover a surprising picture. Among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the U.S., the majority are rural, many of them rarely if ever researched; only 12 are cities.

In The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, the authors paint portraits of places within the three regions of America whose residents are living—and dying—with homicide rates as high as anywhere else in the nation. What these regions have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation, has made them into what the authors describe as “internal colonies.”

This history and its reverberations are facts, these acclaimed and engaged public scholars argue, that must shape a new War on Poverty, 60 years after LBJ’s unfinished first one.

Written by

Black Man’s Burden

After the Civil War, as national leaders hurried to consolidate and expand their reunited empire, Congress approved the largest standing force the United States had fielded in its history. This regular army included, for the first time, African American regiments—the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry, and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry— initially filled with hundreds of formerly enslaved men who were otherwise maligned in almost every corner of American society. As armed representatives of the state, the “Black regulars” found unusual equality in the army and performed critical roles in service to the country’s military aspirations. They helped secure United States empire in the transcontinental West and along the Mexican border, and then in the Caribbean and the Pacific. They became heroes in the Black press, and indeed,to many of their white officers, who endorsed them for combat decorations and sang their praises. For half a century, Black regulars aided in the enlargement of what expansionists by 1900 were calling the Greater United States.

But what might have been a path to equal treatment and patriotic credibility for Black soldiers instead inflamed white supremacist outrage. Over time, the fact of armed African Americans proved intolerable to many white people, from local citizens to military officials to some officers in the four regiments. Here was the uniformed Black man’s burden—he was both agent and target of white supremacy and state authority. And when bigotry and violence became unbearable, some Black regulars took on a third role as rebels against Jim Crow. In the worst but not first rupture of these impossible contradictions, men in the Twenty-Fourth Infantry staged a deadly uprising against police brutality and racism in Houston, Texas, in July 1917.

Black Man’s Burden: Jim Crow and Mutiny in an Age of Empire tells the epic, globe-spanning story of the rise and fall of the Black regiments. The book centers them in a revised history of American empire and military growth during a pivotal half-century for both, following the Black regulars as they abetted settler colonialism in the West; hemispheric  dominion in Cuba and Mexico; and global empire in Hawai’i and the Philippines. For five decades, these men projected American power, attracted white supremacist violence, and responded with acts of both accommodation and resistance.Their story ends in Houston, where the rebellion of infantrymen in the Twenty-Fourth led to the largest murder trial inUnited States history and the execution of nineteen Black soldiers.

Written by