Written in the aftermath of the American Civil War during the ferment of national Reconstruction, Walt Whitman s Democratic Vistas remains one of the most penetrating analyses of democracy ever written. Diagnosing democracy s failures as well as laying out its vast possibilities, Whitman offers an unflinching assessment of the ongoing social experiment known as the United States. Now available for the first time in a facsimile of the original 1870 1871 edition, with an introduction and annotations by noted Whitman scholar Ed Folsom that illuminate the essay s historical and cultural...