Word: americaness
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Alexis de Tocqueville is famously taught in American middle schools and high schools as the Frenchman who loved America and who wrote the treatise “Democracy in America” in the mid-19th century. There is usually no further discussion of the man or his famous book before moving on to material deemed more important by state-standardized testing boards. The motives behind Tocqueville’s mission are therefore overlooked and any meaninful insight into his character is completely lost...
...people’s minds, whether it’s a just one or an unreasonable one, nothing is more difficult than to uproot it.” One could say Harvard Professor Leo Damrosch faces this challenge in writing “Toqueville’s Discovery of America.” In his new book, Damrosch is attempting to remedy the general American conception of Tocqueville through a meticulously-researched, accessible, and thoroughly charming account of the writer’s journey across 19th-century America. Instead of leaving Tocqueville as the flat character oft-quoted in college...
Damrosch’s purpose in “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” however, is not solely to demystify the man behind the famous work of social science. The anecdotes about Tocqueville serve a greater purpose: to illuminate the ideas and thought processes of an author who wrote the text that continues to define American democracy across the world...
...were more like French aristocrats than any Americans that he had met up to that point. Between his discussions with intellectuals and civilians that he met on the streets, Tocqueville became aware of the distinct separation between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law in America. He concluded that the “habits of the heart” and the ideals of the common people held together a society as much as written laws...
...when you were first at home in the U.S., you found yourself looking over your shoulder. Do you still have that feeling? Like the Iranian government could come after you? Yes, sometimes I do. I wonder if they can still read my e-mails now that I'm in America. Do they follow me here? They made it seem like they have agents all over the world, and I know that they do have a lot of agents in different parts of the world. I know other former prisoners feel the same way I do, and some have been threatened...