Richardson’s account bears the weight of the intense debates in recent years over how to teach and commemorate American history. Historians have been divided, roughly, into two camps. On the one side, there are those who are committed to revealing the conquest, violence, racism, and ecological exploitation that haunt every apparent accomplishment of the United States; on the other, there are those who insist that regardless of its flaws, the United States remains a noble experiment in self-government and constitutional order. This argument over national symbols and myths is often presented in stark and simple terms. Was the United States born in a glorious revolution in 1776—or was its birth really in 1619, when the first enslaved African people arrived in Virginia? Is the United States a democratic nation that embodies the best hopes and aspirations of a free humanity—or is it, at its heart, a country born out of a war to exterminate the Indigenous inhabitants of the continent? How can we think and speak honestly about the bleak history of the country while also salvaging what seems redeemable within it—assuming anything really is?
Richardson is aware of these conflicts, and by arguing that egalitarianism is the authentic creed of the country, she does align herself with one side more than the other. But she also wants to find a way to bring these two narratives together: to keep the ideals of American democracy and egalitarianism but to change the heroes. In her telling, the very people who have been most excluded throughout American history are the ones who have most forcefully advanced its central ideas and principles. Yet the ideas and principles are still there, a promise and a beacon to be taken up by those who were not included under them at the start.
In certain ways, Richardson’s account resembles that of Howard Zinn, another great popularizer of American history. But her insistence—echoing that of the pre–Civil War Republicans—that the champions of democracy are the conservative force in American society, while the “slave power” and its later manifestations are a radical force bent on transforming American institutions, means that she has little to say about the leading figures in Zinn’s account, namely the radical activists whose work and utopian vision were necessary to press the United States toward greater democracy. There are very few of these actors in Richardson’s book. While we hear a lot about Lincoln and the Republicans in the 1850s and ’60s and Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in the 1930s and ’40s, we hear little about the abolitionists, the socialists, or the Industrial Workers of the World, and certainly not the Communist Party of the 1930s—which, with its slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism” and its embrace of the iconography of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln—also sought to claim the mantle of democracy. The New Left, Black Power, the radical feminist and gay and lesbian activists of the 1960s are barely mentioned; Richardson says little about the various anti-war movements as well, either in the 1960s or at other points. The people who pressed for radical change in American politics are portrayed as being, on some level, in its mainstream all along.