No other book is as pervasively woven into the fabric of American public life and culture as Democracy in America. Tocqueville's study of nineteenth-century America is cited often and everywhere: from presidential addresses to high-school speeches, from the editorial pages of national newspapers to local radio broadcasts, from high-school and college classrooms to Sunday sermons. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1835 and 1840 English translations of Tocqueville's two volumes by his friend Henry Reeve. It allows today's readers to experience the book as Tocqueville's contemporaries did. It is accompanied by a full-scale introduction addressing Democracy in America's canonical place in American life and by essential explanatory annotations.