Fifteen Days in the Wilderness

Description

In these pages, Tocqueville tells of the journey he undertook in July 1831 from Detroit to Saginaw with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Devastated forests, deserts that became cities, persecuted aboriginal peoples: nothing will be the same in America after the arrival of the white man.

Description

Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for having written a brilliant and prescient study of the emerging American democracy, its politics and form of government, its economics, demographics, and attitudes, in short, almost everything that could be known about this new country and the character of the new man, the 'American.' His book is, of course, *Democracy in America*, the first volume of which was published in France in 1835. Arguably, few have ever seen America and the Americans with quite so much insight. Tocqueville gained his understanding of the new country and its inhabitants through the experience of a nine-month trip to North America in 1831, when the American republic was about fifty years old. Tocqueville was just twenty-five when he made this trip, a fact that makes his great intellectual accomplishment, *Democracy in America*, all the more impressive. *Fifteen Days in the Wilderness* is a journal that he kept during a two-week side trip to the Lower Michigan peninsula. It is a charming, ironic, and vivid picture of America before it was the country we know today: an America of virgin forests and of Native American culture, both at the point of being overwhelmed by the steady advance of European 'civilization.' It was Tocqueville's understanding of the precarious condition of both the wilderness and its native inhabitants that inspired him to undertake his journey to Saginaw.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Fifteen Days in the WildernessPaperbackThe Porcupine Press2017-01-01
• 15 jours dans le désert.CNDP, CRDP1982-01-01
• Quindici giorni nel deserto americanoSellerio1989-01-01
• Quinze jours au désert americainMass Market PaperbackEditions Mille et une Nuits1998-01-01
• Quince días en las soledades americanasPaperbackBarataria2005-01-01
• Quince días en el desierto americanoPaperbackLibros del Zorzal2007-01-01