Aristocracy in America: From the Sketch-Book of a German Nobleman (Studies in Constitutional Democracy) - Hardcover

Grund, Francis J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826221564 ISBN 13: 9780826221568

Publisher: University of Missouri, 2018

Synopsis

In Jacksonian America, as Grund exposes, the wealthy inhabitants of northern cities and the plantation South may have been willing to accept their poorer neighbors as political and legal peers, but rarely as social equals. In this important work, he thus sheds light on the nature of the struggle between “aristocracy” and “democracy” that loomed so large in early republican Americans’ minds.
 
Francis J. Grund, a German emigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including this fictional, satiric travel memoir in response to Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America. Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund’s dynamic engagement in American political life, and brings to light many of Grund’s reflections on American social and political life previously published only in German. Mattes shows how Grund’s work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States.

About this title

About the Author:

Armin Mattes is assistant research professor and assistant editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood.

Review:

“Mattes has done historians a real service by contextualizing and annotating a primary source that, among its many discernments, finds inequality in America, not in the political and economic spheres, but in a pseudo-aristocratic social elitism.”—Kevin Butterfield, director of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma, author of The Making of Tocqueville’s America

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0826221564
• ISBN 13: 9780826221568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 452
• Editor: Mattes Armin