Content Warning: The guide and source text discuss hate speech, racism, enslavement, racial and gender prejudice, genocide and displacement of Indigenous Americans, anti-Black violence, and systemic inequalities through American history. To refer to the collective of Americans who are not of European descent, Heather Cox Richardson uses the phrase “people of color,” which this guide preserves. Both the guide and the source text are specific about race and ethnicity where applicable.

Richardson’s two key goals are to examine The Throughline of Authoritarian Sentiment in US History and to think about How to Defend American Democracy. Authoritarianism is a type of political regime that represses freedoms and that expects obedience and submission to authority. Though Richardson juxtaposes authoritarianism and democracy, they are not necessarily opposites. Richardson demonstrates how a country like the United States can have hallmarks of both types of government.

Authoritarian regimes take advantage of The Use of False History to Manipulate Ideology, “creating a disaffected population and promising to re-create an imagined past where those people could feel important again” (14). This “imagined past” constructs a mythological history in which life was better; importantly, this type of past never existed.