John Prideaux

speaker

643 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Jun

John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Approaching it via the water, it feels like a great and powerful civilization is opening its arms out to you.

On this trip I stood on the passenger deck and took it all in.

But I wasn't here for the sightseeing.

I was on the trail of a long dead hero of mine.

Alexis de Tocqueville also arrived here by boat almost two hundred years before me in May eighteen thirty one.

He was twenty five, a wiry brown haired aristocrat on a mission from the French government, visiting the New World for the first time.

Togville wasn't greeted by an imposing skyline.

Back then, New York was a modest outpost of bricks and timber, almost entirely confined to the lower tip of Manhattan.

Paris was four times bigger.

Pigs roamed the streets.

This was no superpower.

The country was barely 50 years old, with just 24 states.

Voting was mostly for white men.

If Europeans thought about America at all, it was as a cranky political experiment doomed to fail.

But Tocqueville caught a glimpse of something different.

America was a vision of what the future might hold.

A land with no kings or queens, where citizens made the rules, the first modern society without an aristocracy.

To a young man, curious to understand how liberalism and democracy worked in practice, it was an exhilarating case study.

So Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont set off on a road trip.

It took them nine months.

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