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 context, this searing analysis of American culture offers readers today the opportunity to argue with Whitman over the nature of democracy and the future of the nation.
Living in Washington, D.C., where Congress granted male African Americans the right to vote nearly five years before the fifteenth amendment extended that right across the nation, and working for the office charged with enforcing the new civil rights amendments to the Constitution, Whitman was at the volatile center of his nation’s massive attempt to reconstruct and redefine itself after the tumultuous years of civil war. In the enduring cultural document that Democratic Vistas has become, the great poet of democracy analyzes the role that literature plays in the development of a culture, the inevitable tensions between the “democratic individual” and the “democratic nationality,” and the corrosive effects of materialism on the democratic spirit.
His own conflicting racial biases notwithstanding, Whitman in Democratic Vistas offers his most eloquent and extended articulation of the beckoning American democratic future. At a time when the nation has elected a president whom Whitman could never have imagined, his controversial and provocative book is a timely reminder of those occasions when we experience the expansion of America’s democratic dream.
This edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia is the first edition that enables the reader to see at a glance the stages of evolution of the work from the completion of the manuscript draft of the first edition in 1685 to the publication of the third edition, authorized by Newton, in 1726.
A photographic reprint of this final version, the present edition exhibits on the same page the variant readings from the seven other texts. This design allows the reader to see all the changes that Newton introduced and to determine exactly how the last and definitive edition, published a few months before Newton’s death, grew from earlier versions.
A series of appendices provides additional material on the development of the Principia; the contributions of Roger Cotes and of Henry Pemberton; drafts of Newton’s preface to the third edition; a bibliography of the Principia, describing in detail the three substantive editions and all the known subsequent editions; an index of names mentioned in the third edition; and a complete table of contents of the third edition.
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