Tocqueville in America Softcover - 1996

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835) has long been a touchstone for almost any discussion of the American polity. Tocqueville, a 29-year-old French nobleman, traveled the breadth of Jacksonian America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont to inquire into the future of French society as revolutionary upheaval gave way to a representative government similar to America's. In Tocqueville in America, George Wilson Pierson reconstructs - from diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts - the two Frenchmen's nine-month tour and their evolving analysis of American society. We see Tocqueville near Detroit, noting the scattered settlement patterns of the frontier and the affinity of Americans for solitude; in Boston, witnessing the jury system at work; in Philadelphia, observing the suffocating moral regimen at the new Eastern State Prison (which still stands); and in New Orleans, disturbed by the racial caste system and the lassitude of the French-speaking population. This first complete paperback edition of Tocqueville in America restores to print sections on Tocqueville's journeys to the South and the frontier West, as well as observations on slavery and American women that were omitted from the abridged 1959 edition.