Tocqueville and Beaumont in America
New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. xiv, [2], 852 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Frontis illustration. 32 additional illustrations. Footnotes. Table of Abbreviations. Chapter Notes. Bibliography. Index. Some weakness at the rear board, restrengthened with glue. George Wilson Pierson (October 22, 1904 – October 12, 1993) was an American academic, historian, author and Larned Professor of History at Yale University. He was the first official historian of the university. Pierson earned a B.A. at Yale in 1926, and was awarded a Ph.D. in history from Yale in 1933. His dissertation was "Two Frenchmen in America, 1831–1832," a study of the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in the United States. It won the distinguished John Addison Porter Prize from the university for best work of scholarship that year. Pierson's published writings encompass 38 works in 53 publications in 2 languages and 3,892 library holdings. His works are widely studied and are used frequently in most collegiate level U.S. history courses. This is the narrative of an intellectual adventure: the story of how two ambitious French aristocrats of 1831 risked honor, comfort, and career in quest of an understanding of democratic government in the modern world. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were extraordinarily young and inexperienced when they set sail. They had no very great command of the English language. They were supposed to devote their time to an inspection of American prisons for the government of Louis Philippe. And they were recalled after only nine months. Yet out of their American experiences later emerge a boo that was to affect the thinking of the western world: Tocqueville's De La Democratie En Amerique. Why, precisely Tocqueville and Beaumont decided to escape from France, how they secured their official mission, where they went in the Untied States and Canada, what they saw, whom they talked to, and how gradually there took shape in Tocqueville's mind the outline of his commenentary and the substance of his striking political philosophy will here for the first time be set forth. The account has been reconstructed from a few published writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, and from a a mass of newly discovered letters, diaries, sketches, and other unpublished manuscripts: the whole pieced together into a story that is at the same time a personal biography, a panorama of the United States in 1931-1832, and a coherent history of Tocqueville's thought up to the publication of his book. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, Sing Sing Prison, New York, Buffalo, Iroquois, Lake Oneida, Great Lakes, Canada, Stockbridge, Boston, Self-Government, Cincinnati, Memphis, Choctaw, Sam Houston, New Orleans, Penitentiary
[Book #82601]
Price: $150.00