Tocqueville's Discovery of America

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America , was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America , the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his end