#DEMOCRACY 3 AMERICA GUIDE FREE#

In fact, the greatest danger Americans faced was inherent in their treatment of unpopular minorities.įrom the founding period to the time of his visit, Americans had become increasingly more egalitarian and democratic.

#DEMOCRACY 3 AMERICA GUIDE FREE#

But he also saw and criticized the way white majorities supported the institution of slavery and the unjust treatment of free blacks and Native Americans. In America, he saw and praised a people who enjoyed an unprecedented equality of conditions and political and civil liberty without endangering order or prosperity. Democracy’s greatest dangerĮquipped with a deep understanding of the achievements and failures of European civilization and an equally deep passion for liberty and human dignity, Tocqueville was able to bring his complex perspective to bear on his subject. With this challenge in mind, we have developed a new unit that focuses on one of the most famous and controversial of Tocqueville’s arguments. I wanted to know democracy, if only to know at least what we must hope or fear from it.”Ī complex informational text such as this poses an invigorating challenge to high school students. In his introduction, Tocqueville writes: “In America, I saw more than America… I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions. The book is influential both for its study of American society in the Jacksonian period and for its analysis of democracy.

His nine-month sojourn led to the writing of Democracy in America, universally regarded as one of the most influential books ever written.

In 1831, an ambitious and unusually perceptive twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States. A French aristocrat visits Jacksonian America

Democracy 3 america guide